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landingtreeNotes rather than review, since I haven't finished it - my time management for book club reading is never good, but since I am also bad at finishing nonfiction once the impetus of the book club is removed, I won't wait to write it up.
This is a look at the origins and trajectory of the mall in the U.S. It's organisationally chaotic - I wondered if I was just dozy for too much of my reading time, but others in the book club agreed, and apparently the later chapters become even more willing to go off on tangents - but interesting enough that I've gone off and found one of her other books to read.
I didn't know the basics of what made malls. The architect Victor Gruen built the first ones in Detroit, then, in Minnesota,* the first covered one. That they were designed as centres for suburban sprawl, I more or less knew - but didn't know how exciting they were at first, how much the design community loved them. The book discusses why mall exteriors tend to be so bland - part of it, of course, is that the purpose of a mall exterior is to route people as efficiently as possible inside, so all you really want is a highly visible entrance, but also, the first malls didn't need to compete with each other, each one was enough of an event on its own. Later malls would get into closer competition and develop more exciting exteriors, at the same time as mall architecture fell in prestige, and a low/high culture divide cut in between mall architects and museum architects - even though many of them swapped jobs and influences all the time.
Malls offer weather control - safe places for people who want to walk but can't deal with weather, such as the elderly. Malls are attempts to run public space on private land with private security - variants of this are covered, like the attempt of malls to return to downtown as cornucopian Festival Markets and closed pedestrian streets - ninety percent of which failed - or Business Improvement Districts, groups of freestanding shops which have decided to federate, paying into a common fund to cover advertising, development, security etc.
Malls often took white middle-class women as their ideal customer. I would (and may) read a whole book about the history of department stores as women's places of rest and leisure - the book also talks about how caretaking space for customers shares a skill set with housework and is also mostly done by women. This comparison is not expanded upon but I'd like to see more of it. The whiteness of malls ditto, discussions of race and racism are diffused lightly through this book and I wanted more case studies. Car-centricity skewed malls white and wealthy, very deliberately, to the extent of developers sometimes preventing bus stops from being placed near them. History of predominantly black malls, places where the economic logic of these originally white spaces has shifted, I would've liked a whole chapter on. (From book club discussion I don't *think* any of the last three chapters are about this specifically).
This book really made me want to go back to the malls of my childhood, which I didn't think anything would ever do, but it did so by focusing on on malls with coherent design and vision - NorthPark inspired by an art gallery and with an exacting house style, Jerde's malls of experience, influenced by Disneyland and Bradbury - I'm not sure the malls of my childhood had that. Instead of being run by families or developers with singular vision, most malls became, or were built from the get-go to be, places of transience, without central vision, an endless polyping off of new wings and halls.
No one in the book club really had hanging out at malls as defining experience of teenagerhood - we are a small anecdotal sample, presumably the real thing exists. I remember being asked byleaflemming to count the smiles we saw at St Lukes shopping centre when I was a child, and seeing few; reading about the fairy mall in The Iron Dragon's Daughter where the mall is a land of dangerous glamours and going there is like going under the hill and thinking "Yup." St Lukes mall is my first memory of an environment that's truly unfriendly to pedestrians.** And going to movies.
Everything about Jon Jerde's designs appeals to me - nooks and crannies, wandering through a great variety of architecture in short order, up and down bridges, looking in and out of cutouts, a landscape of unnatural and interesting variation making me think both of Chinese Scholars' Gardens and the computer game The Witness - which did, I discover, hire urban planners to design its implausible yet coherent island of microclimates. Gardens full of nooks and crannies and variety are my jam. Then I saw a photo in the book of one of Jerde's actual malls and thought, "It's possible the version of this in my head is better, and this would just look like kitsch to me." In any case, its sun appears to have set: most Jerde malls are closed.
(What I know to be covered in the part of this book I didn't read: the Instagram romance of the dying mall, possible reuses of the dead mall. Though asambyr said, malls aren't really a good shape for much except malls, and though turning their carparks into green parks would be great, you can't compost asphalt).
*My knowledge of what cities are in what states is not good. Sometimes I even take a moment to know whether something is a state as opposed to a city. Puts me in mind of when, as a child, I couldn't yet remember whether Europe was a part of England or vice versa. I can be excused this as a New Zealander, but my knowledge of what's where in New Zealand is also not fabulous, and that's even with the advantage of our being very small.
**Note: after last book club when we read about pedestrian deaths, I have been very much more aware of how many of the cars around me are huge more-dangerous SUVs, but also, there is one dodgy-seeming road-crossing I often do, from Evans Bay back towards the city, and the next time I went there after reading this book I discovered they were building a new pedestrian crossing there, so, go Wellington. Mind you, even dodgy crossings here aren't as dodgy as the States offers; our widest roads just aren't as wide.
This is a look at the origins and trajectory of the mall in the U.S. It's organisationally chaotic - I wondered if I was just dozy for too much of my reading time, but others in the book club agreed, and apparently the later chapters become even more willing to go off on tangents - but interesting enough that I've gone off and found one of her other books to read.
I didn't know the basics of what made malls. The architect Victor Gruen built the first ones in Detroit, then, in Minnesota,* the first covered one. That they were designed as centres for suburban sprawl, I more or less knew - but didn't know how exciting they were at first, how much the design community loved them. The book discusses why mall exteriors tend to be so bland - part of it, of course, is that the purpose of a mall exterior is to route people as efficiently as possible inside, so all you really want is a highly visible entrance, but also, the first malls didn't need to compete with each other, each one was enough of an event on its own. Later malls would get into closer competition and develop more exciting exteriors, at the same time as mall architecture fell in prestige, and a low/high culture divide cut in between mall architects and museum architects - even though many of them swapped jobs and influences all the time.
Malls offer weather control - safe places for people who want to walk but can't deal with weather, such as the elderly. Malls are attempts to run public space on private land with private security - variants of this are covered, like the attempt of malls to return to downtown as cornucopian Festival Markets and closed pedestrian streets - ninety percent of which failed - or Business Improvement Districts, groups of freestanding shops which have decided to federate, paying into a common fund to cover advertising, development, security etc.
Malls often took white middle-class women as their ideal customer. I would (and may) read a whole book about the history of department stores as women's places of rest and leisure - the book also talks about how caretaking space for customers shares a skill set with housework and is also mostly done by women. This comparison is not expanded upon but I'd like to see more of it. The whiteness of malls ditto, discussions of race and racism are diffused lightly through this book and I wanted more case studies. Car-centricity skewed malls white and wealthy, very deliberately, to the extent of developers sometimes preventing bus stops from being placed near them. History of predominantly black malls, places where the economic logic of these originally white spaces has shifted, I would've liked a whole chapter on. (From book club discussion I don't *think* any of the last three chapters are about this specifically).
This book really made me want to go back to the malls of my childhood, which I didn't think anything would ever do, but it did so by focusing on on malls with coherent design and vision - NorthPark inspired by an art gallery and with an exacting house style, Jerde's malls of experience, influenced by Disneyland and Bradbury - I'm not sure the malls of my childhood had that. Instead of being run by families or developers with singular vision, most malls became, or were built from the get-go to be, places of transience, without central vision, an endless polyping off of new wings and halls.
No one in the book club really had hanging out at malls as defining experience of teenagerhood - we are a small anecdotal sample, presumably the real thing exists. I remember being asked by
leaflemming to count the smiles we saw at St Lukes shopping centre when I was a child, and seeing few; reading about the fairy mall in The Iron Dragon's Daughter where the mall is a land of dangerous glamours and going there is like going under the hill and thinking "Yup." St Lukes mall is my first memory of an environment that's truly unfriendly to pedestrians.** And going to movies. Everything about Jon Jerde's designs appeals to me - nooks and crannies, wandering through a great variety of architecture in short order, up and down bridges, looking in and out of cutouts, a landscape of unnatural and interesting variation making me think both of Chinese Scholars' Gardens and the computer game The Witness - which did, I discover, hire urban planners to design its implausible yet coherent island of microclimates. Gardens full of nooks and crannies and variety are my jam. Then I saw a photo in the book of one of Jerde's actual malls and thought, "It's possible the version of this in my head is better, and this would just look like kitsch to me." In any case, its sun appears to have set: most Jerde malls are closed.
(What I know to be covered in the part of this book I didn't read: the Instagram romance of the dying mall, possible reuses of the dead mall. Though as
ambyr said, malls aren't really a good shape for much except malls, and though turning their carparks into green parks would be great, you can't compost asphalt). *My knowledge of what cities are in what states is not good. Sometimes I even take a moment to know whether something is a state as opposed to a city. Puts me in mind of when, as a child, I couldn't yet remember whether Europe was a part of England or vice versa. I can be excused this as a New Zealander, but my knowledge of what's where in New Zealand is also not fabulous, and that's even with the advantage of our being very small.
**Note: after last book club when we read about pedestrian deaths, I have been very much more aware of how many of the cars around me are huge more-dangerous SUVs, but also, there is one dodgy-seeming road-crossing I often do, from Evans Bay back towards the city, and the next time I went there after reading this book I discovered they were building a new pedestrian crossing there, so, go Wellington. Mind you, even dodgy crossings here aren't as dodgy as the States offers; our widest roads just aren't as wide.
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Date: 2022-10-13 03:58 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-10-14 03:12 am (UTC)(Oh, Anne Ursu is Breadcrumbs, which I liked, I should read the Chronicles of Cronus sometime.)
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Date: 2022-10-15 03:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-10-13 11:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-10-14 03:09 am (UTC)