![]() She begins with the architect Victor Gruen, who in 1956 created the climate-controlled, enclosed space that we know today when Southdale Center opened in a Minneapolis suburb. Read: When malls saved the suburbs from despair But while malls, like their city counterparts, serve as public spaces, they are privately owned and policed, and any sense of community that one gets from spending time at them is always secondary to the primary pursuit of consumption. Malls became the suburban equivalent of downtown shopping districts. If the American dream was owning a detached house for your nuclear family, the mall was where you bought the goods to fill your home and clothe your kids. “The late-twentieth-century United States doesn’t make sense without the mall,” Lange writes. Malls grew alongside-and because of-the federally subsidized postwar expansion of the suburbs. And she posits that there’s still a place for malls in our society, as long as they adapt to better serve their communities. At their best, malls have always been more than just sites of conspicuous consumption and leisure, but places for communities to gather, to see and be seen, fulfilling a “basic human need.” Lange’s book reminds us that the mall has helped shape American society, and has evolved with our country since the 1950s. ![]() Lange wants us to consider how in prematurely writing off the mall as dead, or in thinking of it as “a little bit embarrassing as the object of serious study, ” we neglect the important role these buildings have played in our lives. Meet Me by the Fountain challenges the dominant narrative. ![]() And yet, people keep shopping.” (A 2021 study found that as of June of last year, the number of mall visitors across the country was actually 5 percent higher than before the pandemic.) “And yet,” she writes, “the majority of malls survive. Every decade rewrites the obituary in its own terms.” Lange considers how, since the 1978 movie Dawn of the Dead, we have been using “the apocalyptic scale, the language and imagery of civilizational collapse,” to describe the state of this most American form of architecture. Since the coronavirus pandemic hit, the forecasts have grown only more dire: In June 2020, a former department-store executive predicted that a third of malls would close by the next year.Īs the design critic Alexandra Lange writes in her consummate study Meet Me by the Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall, “Malls have been dying for the past forty years. The cause of death was variously chalked up to the growth of e-commerce, the demise of the department store, and the fact that our country has been overmalled since the 1990s, when developers saturated the suburbs, building new shopping meccas just miles from old ones. Then came a string of stories in 20, when Time, The Wall Street Journal, and CNN declared the end of the mall anew, all citing a Credit Suisse report anticipating that about one in four would close by 2022. ![]() ![]() In 2015, The New York Times published its own photography of eerily empty buildings in Ohio and Maryland. The Guardian announced its death in 2014, in an article featuring Seph Lawless’s photography of abandoned malls, their once-lively atriums gone to seed. The American mall has supposedly been dying for years. ![]()
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