April 1, 2022
A deeply researched history of the American shopping mall. "The American dream--bootstraps, frontier, white picket fence--did not originally include malls," writes architectural and design critic Lange, author of The Design of Childhood and other books. While the enclosed mall had forerunners in the shopping centers of an earlier era, the modern mall was a postwar innovation brought to the U.S. courtesy of an Austrian refugee who had models in the arcades of Renaissance Italy. Of course, the American dream embodied by the mall was not available to everyone. It was a thing of the suburbs and, as such, was racially divided, "born from speculation that a whites-only version of the city...would prove to be a better return on investment." Later mall developers built in downtown urban areas, with race slowly giving way, at least in some places, to a distaste for the teenagers who flocked there simply to have someplace to go. As Lange writes, one solution was to build game arcades in distant corners away from the anchor department stores to which grown-ups were drawn. The author covers a great deal of ground, and while her narrative sometimes threatens to become a data dump, there are numerous fruitful avenues to explore--e.g., the role of Muzak in mall culture and beyond, the metamorphosis of the mall in different regions, the origins of "mall walking," and the slow, tortured decline of the mall as numerous factors--not least of them the advent of online shopping--came into play. Lange concludes by examining the possibility that the mall might be reborn as something more than simply a shopping space by incorporating offices, hotels, and even educational centers. And yes, plenty of shops: "Shopping isn't going anywhere, and it's so much nicer to do it together." The mall is dead--but it may yet live again, as Lange's instructive book capably shows.
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April 25, 2022
Design critic Lange (The Design of Childhood) delivers a thought-provoking cultural history of the shopping mall. Noting that malls emerged as the U.S. “reinvented itself” in the decades after WWII, Lange recounts how Austrian architect Victor Gruen convinced the owners of J. L. Hudson department store in Detroit to build four regional shopping centers in the city’s booming suburbs. Northland Center, which opened in 1954, had a covered passageway linking its six buildings and landscaped plazas to provide “circulation and a sense of orientation for the shopper.” Its success led to Gruen’s development of America’s first enclosed shopping mall in a Minneapolis suburb in 1956 and set the stage for later innovations, including Boston’s Faneuil Hall, which repurposed 19th-century market buildings and featured “quirky and local businesses” rather than chain stores, and the rise of supersized malls, including the Mall of America. Lange also explores how malls gave teenagers newfound independence and reinforced racial inequities by catering to predominately white suburbanites. Contending that malls answer “the basic human need” of bringing people together, Lange advocates for retrofitting abandoned shopping centers into college campuses, senior housing, and “ethnocentric marketplaces” catering to immigrant communities. Lucid and well researched, this is an insightful study of an overlooked and undervalued architectural form. Agent: Joe Veltre, Gersh Agency.
May 1, 2022
In this spry architectural history, Lange (The Design of Childhood, 2018) tracks the American shopping mall's postwar origins, evolution during the second half of the twentieth century, and twenty-first-century collapse and future possibility. Beginning with personal memories of the North Carolina malls near where she grew up--the piercings and the Muzak, the angst and the miniskirts--she seems to invite readers to map their own mall experiences onto the chronologically organized accounts of architects, developers, and specific sites that follow. To chart overarching trends over time, each chapter is brought to life by a topic (like the downtown mall of the 1970s or the amusement-park mall of the 1980s) and a few pioneering protagonists.Throughout, Lange is attentive to the ways in which twentieth-century visions of the mall as a kind of town square were deliberately conceived to keep out people of color and of lower incomes. This reminder of how the smells, sights, sounds, and spatial layout of the nation's malls are carefully controlled is an important counterpoint to the highly individualized experiences that animate them.
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