Review: Alexandra Lange’s Meet Me by the Fountain

About once a year I ask friends to meet by the fountain – the one in front of the railway station near the city I grew up in, in the north of France. This is what the title first brought to mind, and I wasn’t too far off. Lange examines the mall as an American form of architecture that provided a form of privately-owned public space for a wide range of people to meet and congregate. She points that, all of us in their thirties or older probably “has” a mall, its shape and structure living in our brain rent free. A form of architecture developing in the 1940s and expanding after World War 2, it peaks in the 1980s in the US, and I’d say a little later (1990-2000s) in France. The mall was the public realm of the suburbs, however tightly and privately controlled. The book shows how it came to be, and its cultural significance.

The first chapter focuses on the origins of the mall, a form of shopping district emerging with the (white) suburbs. It focuses on the work of Victor Gruen and Elsie Krummeck, who gave the mall its initial vocabulary: an indoor street lined with stores, department stores as anchor tenants, an atrium, an “I” shape getting progressively more complex by adding corners and aisles, the presence of public art. All factors that enable malls to become safe, entertaining spaces for many different groups, opened at most hours of the day and protected from the weather. The second chapter focuses on the indoor design of malls, the use of natural elements like plants and water plans, and the maintenance that goes into this controlled environment. Chapter 3 discusses malls as debated public infrastructure and contested development projects. Chapter 4 dives in the mall as an entertainment complex. Chapter 5 is all about the social groups coming to the mall, with a strong attention to youth culture, from arcades to media starts. Chapter 6 thinks through the mall as a background and participant in cinema, in particular horror zombie movies. Chapter 7 is all about the malls’ loss of cultural relevance. Chapter 8 outlines ways forward for malls needing to stay relevant, and the development of food courts. Chapter 9 concludes with the mall abroad, and cities like Seoul that were essentially built on them. Along the way, malls are situated within the architecture and Science and Technology studies scholarship, and sci-fi author Bradbury makes an appearance: he strongly influenced the design of Los Angeles’s Glendale Galleria.

This is a book to pick through for some, and a book that will speak malls nerd and architecture amateurs. As a foreigner, I’d of course have loved to read more about the design of malls abroad and their roots in European department stores (which were of great importance in allowing women to independently meet in public spaces). Zola’s Au Bonheur des Dames is mentioned, and I want to add Regarde les lumières mon amour, a diary of going to the mall by Nobel Prize winner Annie Ernaux . The book speaks to the seasonality of malls’ sensory pleasures, their role in sustaining holidays practices like Christmas. Searching for pictures of “my” childhood mall, I was struck by how many photographs of Christmas decorations uploaded by visitors. It also focuses on what is almost absent from the architectural account beyond particular brands that thrived in malls: what people actually buy at the mall, the everyday purchasing, and the interactions with mall workers other than security like till holders. But of course the financing and planning dynamics leading to different mall cultures are too varied to be addressed in one book.

The images spread are arresting, featuring the Commons in Columbus (IN), Quincy Market in Boston (MA) and Horton Plaza in San Diego (CA). They demonstrate how we can learn from the design of malls to build actual public spaces. Lange, true to self, argues we deserve urban and architecture design that sustain communities and a thriving public realm. Malls, despite their limitations, offer many lessons.

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