Meet Me by the Fountain

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.