A World Foreign to Us
In The World in a Shopping Mall, the description of a mall as a “world within walls” is intriguing yet also foreign. While once a thriving model for consumerism, we as a society are undoubtably more familiar with online retail (amazon, ect..) for our shopping needs. However, the idea of the shopping mall extending beyond consumption is something that we could learn from as architects. How can we construct worlds, force interactions, and steer people in a certain direction through architecture? The mall once did all the above, and in doing so influenced the landscape of American culture. The concept of the mall is changing. While we may never construct department stores and shopping malls the way they were originally conceived, there still may be opportunities to learn from their social (and architectural) successes.
The idea that a mall can and should be something more than the empty husk of a consumerist society is particularly intriguing. however, i feel that the issue here is that Crawford looks at a few very specific examples to generalize across all malls, when in reality the consumerist nature led most malls to be single use buildings, rather than the ideal multi-use buildings they could have, and perhaps should have been.
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