Meet Me by the Fountain
An Inside History of the Mall
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- 15,99 €
Descrição da editora
Longlisted for the Porchlight Business Book Awards
"A smart and accessible cultural history."-Los Angeles Times
A portrait--by turns celebratory, skeptical, and surprisingly moving--of one of America's most iconic institutions, from an author who "might be the most influential design critic writing now" (LARB).
Few places have been as nostalgized, or as maligned, as malls. Since their birth in the 1950s, they have loomed large as temples of commerce, the agora of the suburbs. In their prime, they proved a powerful draw for creative thinkers such as Joan Didion, Ray Bradbury, and George Romero, who understood the mall's appeal as both critics and consumers. Yet today, amid the aftershocks of financial crises and a global pandemic, as well as the rise of online retail, the dystopian husk of an abandoned shopping center has become one of our era's defining images. Conventional wisdom holds that the mall is dead. But what was the mall, really? And have rumors of its demise been greatly exaggerated?
In her acclaimed The Design of Childhood, Alexandra Lange uncovered the histories of toys, classrooms, and playgrounds. She now turns her sharp eye to another subject we only think we know. She chronicles postwar architects' and merchants' invention of the mall, revealing how the design of these marketplaces played an integral role in their cultural ascent. In Lange's perceptive account, the mall becomes newly strange and rich with contradiction: Malls are environments of both freedom and exclusion--of consumerism, but also of community. Meet Me by the Fountain is a highly entertaining and evocative promenade through the mall's rise, fall, and ongoing reinvention, for readers of any generation.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.