‘The nature of these vast retail combinations,’ Dreiser wrote in 1900, ‘should they ever permanently disappear, will form an interesting chapter in the commercial history of our nation.’ Ray Bradbury saw the shopping strip as a ‘flowering out of a modest trade principle’, and his influence on the architects of the Glendale Galleria (built in 1976) was acknowledged by Jon Jerde, its principal designer, who was also responsible for the Mall of America in Minnesota (1992), the largest in the Western hemisphere, and the Bellagio Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas (1998). Jerde asked Bradbury to help him think about a project in San Diego, and he replied with a manifesto called ‘The Aesthetics of Lostness’, which still provides the best definition of the ambience of shopping malls, a feeling of comforting distraction and exciting misplacedness akin to foreign travel. ‘Jerde’s strongest precedent,’ Alexandra Lange writes in Meet Me by the Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall (Bloomsbury, £23), ‘came from the same environments for which Bradbury had already written scenarios: world’s fairs and theme parks, which shamelessly mashed up countries, decades, architectural styles and artificial topography in the interest of creating the most exciting visual narrative in the minimum quantity of space.’ ‘Artificial topography’ is very good; it precisely describes so many postwar built environments, from retail plazas to new towns, all of them founded on an idea of the way we might live if we were much better at living. (...)
Lange makes an interesting point about the patriotism of shopping. ‘During World War Two, female consumers were encouraged to plant victory gardens, cook with less meat, collect their scraps and save their pennies. In the postwar era, they were the target of a very different message: the patriotic thing to do was to spend.’ By the 1980s, this was a religion that included religion itself, but to focus too much on consumption would be to miss the special ambience of malls, where the form is so much more fun than the function. As with high flats or holiday camps, we begin to see the essence of these places only in the moment of their passing. Malls are playgrounds with parking. They are nightclubs without drinks and with muzak for music. They are billboards of aspiration and churches of boredom. You don’t wander round a shopping mall in order to be thrilled, but to overcome the wish to be thrilled; if you buy something, that’s fine, but you belong there just as much when you don’t. (To say you’re only shopping when you’re buying stuff is like saying you’re only a sexual person when you’re having sex.) That’s what teenagers understood: the mall was freedom with walls, a habitat much closer to their wants and not-wants than anything built by their parents.Non-fans say they get lost in them, but getting lost is part of the point. You find your way back to the big stores, or you meet at the fountain. When a child is abducted, the mall can suddenly seem part of the abduction, having failed to protect those passing through its human engineering. That was the feeling in 1993 when the Merseyside toddler James Bulger was taken from the Strand Shopping Centre, as if the building itself was guilty of some terrible anomie. If you liked malls as much as I did as a teenager – Rivergate Mall in Irvine New Town, eat your heart out, and the shopping centre in the ‘plug-in city’ of Cumbernauld, now set to be demolished – you find it quite hard to admit all the bad things about them. ‘Go to the mall!’ the Jack Black character in the film of High Fidelity tells a naff customer who asks for an uncool record. That stung, but I knew what he meant. Malls had rubbish record shops. Malls had rubbish shops, full stop, but the shops were pretty much irrelevant. Malls are closing now, one after the other, but Lange is right when she tells us that the US is ‘over malled: the country has approximately 24 square feet of retail space for every American compared with ... 4.6 in the UK and 2.8 in China.’ As that space shrinks in real time, it grows in the imagination, and we think of Amazon aisles that stretch out beyond an invisible horizon, even as shopping malls become the industrial wastelands of the post-Trump era.
And so we look back. ‘During the 1970s,’ Lange writes, ‘a widening split developed between the commercial and academic branches of architecture. Malls ended up on the wrong side of the tracks: good architects design museums; bad architects design malls.’ That was the prevailing attitude, and Rem Koolhaas once referred to Jon Jerde, the Glendale architect, as Frank Gehry’s ‘evil twin’. This was just snobbery, of course: people who go to museums are thought to engage with the building they are in, while shoppers are thought not to notice they’re in a big shed or a bad copy of an Italian village. First: fuck off. Second: Gehry in fact was happy to design a mall in his early days, Santa Monica Place (1980), before the Disneyfying of ‘significant’ public buildings became a cultural cliché. Pop culture has an admirable ability to make its own monuments, and from Dawn of the Dead and Fast Times at Ridgemont High through Mean Girls to The OC, the shopping mall is a place where human beings can be spotted at their most inscrutably social, their most poignantly alone, their most desirous and their most innocent.
by Andrew O'Hagan, LRB | Read more:
Image: uncreditable via web
