central pedestrian courtyard so that they could be set apart from cars and (in
a move paradigmatic for later malls) "turn their backs to the
street."3 The large phase-two centers would simply expand on these principles.
The influential design of Seattle's Northgate, for example, creates a central
pedestrian mall between its two big straight lined strips of stores (which
"turn their backs to the highway"4) and relegates
service activities to a hidden underground tunnel.
Harris notes that the earliest experiments in the separation of pedestrian
customers from cars and from any service activities--creating a carefree inner
circle distant from outside concerns (forget your car, forget the street,
forget services, forget yourself)--were made at shopping centers and at
Disneyland.5 Both malls and Disney's Main Street derive from the
townscape, but their closed, cleaned stage-set "streets" move in similar ways
to keep practical services (deliveries, employee access, building supports,
circuitry, etc.) behind or below the "scene." While one critic describes the
Disney wonderland as "acres of fiberglass fantasy resting upon an unseen
technological superstructure,"6 mall designers combine an interest in
this kind of fantasy entertainment with the more directed goals of selling.
They have good reason to seek to wish away mall superstructure and let the
for-sale merchandise take over center stage. The separation from cars and "the
elimination of all service facilities from the public consciousness" become
the "necessary ingredients" of a shopping center to a 1950s
design theorist 7; these are "necessary" because, as a 1950s planner sees it,
the future center should be a fantasy realm "kaleidoscope of movement . . .
where shoppers will not be conscious of the building but only of the displays.
So already in phases one and two the basic mall structure is set--or rather,
what is set is the denial of superstructure, the desire for an
inner "open" domain freed from external necessities. In this, the earliest
shopping centers join the most modern ones. For example, Victor Gruen creator
of the first modern enclosed mall (what he aptly calls the "introverted
center") writes that he found his inspiration in many aspects of the
nineteenth-century arcades: their self-enclosure around a central pedestrian
plaza, their separation from external weather, from services from traffic, and
from the hostile city environment.9 Like the 1950s suburban malls, Gruen says,
the arcades were born in a movement away from the city, with architectural
gestures of introversion.
Turning Inward
In the 1950s, even with the advent of large-scale single-developer centers,
some regional malls continued to be built simply as giant extensions of the
earliest plans--just your basic straight lines and big blocks on a monumental
scale. But in the late 1950s and early 1960s, some developers began to place a
great new emphasis on design planning and environmental
control. Reacting against the early centers that simply rose up out of the
demands of the road--growing uncontrolled, unstyled, on the "strip"--new mall
designs would turn their focus ever more clearly inwards, strengthening the
existing impulse to self-containment with further major shifts in the
direction of the fully orchestrated mall.
A new self-consciousness in design centered on new problems: (1) the
choice of an atmosphere, and (2) the question of scale. How should the plan
reflect or deflect the fact of a mall's increasingly giant size, its selfenclosure, its clearly controlled environment? Responses to these problems
took two general forms--in phases three and four. Both alternatives, though,
are part of a general movement inward, towards enclosure, and concentration of
effect--reacting to the imposing realities of mall superstructure with a new
focus on special effects for the mall interior.
What we might call phase-three centers are the "market town" styles which
deliberately underplayed their large size (they now often included several
department stores), reacting against the straight lines of the earlier malls
with meandering, informal patterns. Even in earlier phases, this approach had
been very successful. The prototype "Town and Country Village" chain, for
example, backed its name with designs accenting "the charm of irregularity"
and "picturesque congestion,''l0 adding old materials, heavy timber, and tile
roofs for down-home informality. The aptly named Old Orchard mall in Skokie,
Illinois, the first of the extensively landscaped malls, is often seen as the
classic example of the "country market" style in its late 1950s boom years.
Streams, bridges, finely gardened courtyards, and shop squares of varying
dimensions were to suggest the atmosphere of a country village. As in a
diorama,ll the goal was to dissolve the static sense of the building frame,
making it serve simply as the site for perception of changes in visual
effects: "changes of pace, of scale, of direction, of shape, of surface.''l2
Informal arrangements divided the mall experience into a series of cozy
limited views, with meandering water and bridges to lead shoppers on to each
new surprise; as one planner comments, at Old Orchard "the lure of around-the
corner urges the shopper on" so that "he sees more than he otherwise would"
and he "concentrates his attention upon the attractions most nearly at
hand.''l3 Some other of these phase-three rustic malls have two levels, a
crucial innovation (begun by James Rouse) which halves the distance
shoppers have to walk, accents and insulates the courts, allows more views and
more people-watching, and increases the psychological intimacy of the "rural"
setting.
Love Story: Mall as Movie: "Looking," "Buying"
Clearly, the design self-consciousness of the late 1950s brought a great
new emphasis on the psychological effects of mall environments; the big new
design buzzword is "the experience." With the new concentration on special
effects for the mall's "inner realm" comes a new concern with the emotional
"inner realm" of the shopper. A seminal 1957 article by planner and pop
psychologist Richard Bennett speaks for the whole complex of emerging
orthodoxies involving (1) the "village" atmosphere with irregular lines,
changing effects, the "lure of around-the-corner"; (2) the focus on the
"psychological needs" of shoppers; and (3) the new stress on shopping as a
non-utilitarian "visual experience," a quasi-cinematic spectacle, an
adventure.
"The 'looking at' becomes as important as 'the buying,"' writes Bennett,
and so the mall is seen as a sort of "moving picture," with a coyly erotic
plot of Girl Meets Goods: "a piece of architecture--the building --should be
considered as a frame for the picture of the love affair Like a spectator at a
Panorama, this customer should step inside the frame of the "moving
pictures" and walk around immersed in illusion.between a customer and a piece
of merchandise.''l4 If a mall is a successful movie, its shopper will lose
herself (Bennett's 1950s customer is always female), forget that building
frame, suspend disbelief, and consummate "the experience."
When the "buying act" becomes so deeply associated with this kind of
illusionistic visual spectacle, a very special mode of shopping is involved:
It enters an arena of entertainment in which the experience of looking is as
important as the object found, in which customers are willing to "pay for the
atmosphere," for "just looking," and their surplus money goes for emotional
rather than physical necessities. At this turning point in the late 1950s,
Bennett's excitement with the strategies of visual display is part of an
effort to urge a basic mall reorientation to "the impulse-buying which comes
after the essentials are bought."15
(And the "radical shift" to what is now given the strange name of"nonmerchandise retailing" has indeed continued as a major "trendline" for malls
from Bennett's time into the 1980s; with our current emphasis on "specialty"
food-and-entertainment centers, it is the dominant mode.)l6
Bennett details
and reenacts the psychology of impulse-buying because, for him, the designer's
goal is to help release these "impulses," to help free a shopper's "inner"
desires from external concerns (with the "frames" of time, money, self, and so
on). An interior atmosphere of fantasy and festivity can make shopping an
adventure, a "quest," and so bring "more dollars out of women's purses."17
(These fresh 1950s inventions have become our commonplaces, our ad copy, our
household words.) So the changing, irregular views of an "English village"
mall work to keep the buyer dazzled and nearsighted, to prevent a static
overview of the whole, to close off awareness of the outside. And Bennett
relates this to the carnival model of"high-powered merchandising," with its
multiplicity of attractions and rides luring customers into continual movement
while providing no focal point. In fact, malls probably have the most to learn
from the amusement park, "where most people spend more
than they intend." Bennett finally presents the curved lines of Coney Island
as an ideal system for the "country village" mall. This is the vision of
amusement-in-enclosure, of shoppers' losing themselves in involuntary
repetition within the oneiric circles of fun visual attractions: "a
meandering closed ring which returns on itself so that one starts a second
circuit before one realizes it."18
Closing the Ring: Phase Four's "Introverted Center"
Many of these open, village-garden style centers of phrase three are
still flourishing attractions, but it was the era's phase-four design
alternative that set the pattern for most mall development in the next two
decades. The Southdale Shopping Center near Minneapolis, a 1956 work by Victor
Gruen and Associates, added a second major innovation to the new
two-level concept: It was the first large, fully enclosed, air conditioned
mall design. Inspired by the Milan Galleria and nineteenth-century arcades,
what Gruen called "the first introverted center" offered a series of arcade
entrances opening into a large covered central "mall." With this move to
overall enclosure, the center becomes a completely separate domain, sealed
off, an economy in itself. As one observer writes, from this point on, "Malls
aren't part of the community . . . they are the community.''l9 Like the
nineteenth-century arcades, the panoramas, and the exhibition halls, the
enclosed mall can here be seen as a sort of city in itself. And in fact
Southdale's interior sought not village serenity or old-style charm but a
simulation of downtown activity and bustle.
In this enclosed-mall prototype, Gruen arranged his indoor sculpture and
trees, and the closeness of his two levels, to recreate the effects of urban
variety and energy. The interior
model was a suburbanite's dream of an early 1800s unplanned city, offering
substitutes for
streets and an arena of concentration to those feeling the uniformity and
isolation of suburban
sprawl. In 1960, Gruen wrote that the new shopping spaces must "represent an
essentially
urban environment, be busy and colorful, exciting and stimulating, full of
variety and
interest."20 And indeed the decade of the 1960s saw a mall boom with
"increasing
sophistication . . . in successfully repackaging an idealized urban form into
the suburban
milieu."2l
In our day, two-level verticality and overall enclosure have become
standard in the designs
produced and reproduced by the large mall development companies. Since
multiple levels
create problems of access and shopper mobility, systems of undulating ramps,
connecting
bridges, broad staircases, escalators and other "rides" have become necessary
features. And
these can only add high-tech pizzazz to the color and activity of the desired
urban "effect."
Utopia: No Place
But of course part of the mysterious attraction of a
mall's city "feel" is
that it is an "effect"--a designer's virtuoso recreation. First of all, the
background fact of mall
enclosure always works in an intriguing tension with the surfaces of an urban
ambience,
reminding us of the differences between such highly defined space and the
organic chaos of a
town. We get a frisson in recognizing a sameness of mechanical reproduction
behind a mall's
"downtown style" diversity: instead of a competition of unique one-owner
"specialty" shops,
most malls offer outlets of the same widespread franchise chains; reproduced
clones of an
entirely standardized mall design, in fact, often reappear throughout the
continent--with the
same Muzak, fixtures, and controlled climate--denying regional differences or
local color; the
mall crowds, actually, are much more homogenous (housewives, older people,
teenagers) than
those on a city street (or in the ghettos the urban malls have "renewed"); and
those dizzying
mall traffic patterns, we soon recognize, are also clearly preplanned and
permanently fixed.
But too much of this sort of demystifying customer "recognition" is the main
threat to the
phase-four designer. These urban-style malls, though they imitate the city
rather than the
garden village, share basic design goals with phase-three plans. Again the
accent is on
changing views and variety of stimulation; the concern is still to break up
the vast distances
and stark vistas, the increasingly monolithic financial and structural frames,
of the new malls.
At Southridge, for example, an urban bustle of changing elevations, false
walls, shifting
angles, prismatic lighting, and dispersed niches is intended, the designer
writes, to "minimize
the effect" of the mall's horizontal size, to "break up" and "distort the
measurements of space
and distance." Here again, the basic point is to "provide no focal point to
distract from the
visual attraction of the stores "22 to keep shoppers dazzled by each display
as it rises before
their eyes-- and unaware of the enclosing frame.
the current phase five of mall design--with the advent of the urban or
vertical mall. City
planners have always criticized the suburban mentality of the inauthentic
creations that were
draining the downtown: "Of course, any real downtown is more interesting than
a single mall,
just as Los Angeles is more interesting than Disneyland," said Dick Rosann,
director of New
York City's Office of Development, in 1977.3l But by now malls are opening in
many city
centers, and it appears that downtowns may be rebuilt with the help of these
thriving city
replicas in their midst: the Embarcadero Center in San Francisco, Water Tower
Place in
Chicago, Citicenter in New York, Eaton Centre in Toronto, Harborplace in
Baltimore, etc.,
etc.
These urban supermalls are pushing the potentials in verticality and
enclosure to new
extremes. Often, such expanded projects absorb many new functions to increase
their status as
self-contained economies: They can contain dances, lectures, exhibits,
concerts, all
high-school events. Water Tower Place, for example, supports a twenty-twostory hotel and
forty floors of high-price condominiums, so that people can live, work, eat,
shop, tour, or
mingle there--both earning money and spending it --day and night. And this
trend could
continue: There seems to be an omnivorousness inherent in the mall concept;
this hardy form
proliferates by absorbing ever-new life functions. The enclosed mall does not
want to close
itself off, but instead wants always to enclose more.
From early on, shopping centers have been linked to planned communities.
J. C. Nichols's
Country Club Plaza, perhaps America's first center, was part of a planned
Kansas housing
development. In the 1930s and 1940s, planned towns (such as Greenbelt,
Maryland,
Levittown, Long Island, and Park Forest, Illinois) often had experimental
"malls" at their
center. The James Rouse Company, behind one of the earliest enclosed malls in
1958 and
now one of the most prolific mall developers on many fronts, owns several of
today's model
planned communities (with Columbia, Maryland, as centerpiece).32 And Victor
Gruen,
inventor of the enclosed mall, has built on his youthful excitement with the
"ville radieuse" of
Le Corbusier in recent work on Paris's "new city" at La Defense, and has
written a book on
the need to expand the mall concept (as a way out of atomized closure) into
the planning of
minicities or "multi-functional centers."33
"People Movers"
Since they are all several stories high (a dramatic escalation of the
earlier two-story idea),
"vertical malls" make use of new possibilities for large-scale construction in
metal and glass.
Glittering light-drenched courts are designed for dazzlement. But planners use
displays, vistas,
lights, and conveyances to accent a vertiginous sense of movement for a
pragmatic reason:
Extended verticality presents a great problem of shopper circulation. How do
you draw people
along, how do you stimulate them to explore all levels? The main spectacles in
vertical malls,
then, are often fun, fancy forms of moving people: Some modern mall courts
have the playful
amusement-park feel of a flamboyant Portman hotel (and Portman's Hyatts and
multifunctional cities-within-the-city, with their structured chaos and whimsy,
have certainly
influenced mall plans); a few malls actually incorporate amusement park rides
under their
roofs; and some current experiments even replace that glass roof--with huge,
light-permeable,
billowing circus tents more suggestive of the desired shopping mood. Benjamin,
we
remember, described the "art of being off center" as a sort of Dodg'em Cars
ride; urban mall
planners must work to suggest just such an experience.
The elegant Water Tower Place, celebrated as "a system to move and attract
people,"34
greets the shopper with a "cascading garden escalator" which combines a
perspectival
waterfall with automatic stairs. Called a "spectacular," this cascade suggests
an analogy from
nature for the mechanical movement of people; it invites crowds to "flow."
Such organic
analogies for traffic patterns are now basic to almost every design: When
streams flow, we
flow; when they change levels, we change levels; at a pool, we stop and
collect ourselves. In
a similar way, designers use trees to link mall levels visually, to encourage
shoppers to
"climb." Snow's geese--mirroring crowd circulation from the air, "joining" all
levels of the
central galleria by their position in the "landscape" of mall "earth" and
"sky"- -are successful
in this way, almost too uncannily so. (Their movement, suspended animation, is
also reified
wax-model fixity; their free flight is closing on the end of the corridor;
their natural flow is
also artificially "stopped." Like the Time writer at Harborplace, we see this
group movement
from outside, in display form, and this the "natural" "herd" analogy becomes
unsettling.)
The mall designer's main goal is continual "flow." The cascade/ escalator at
Water Tower
9. V. Gruen, Centers for the Urban Environment: Survival of the Cities (N.Y.:
Van Nostrand
Reinhold, 1973) .
10. Baker and Furnaro, 85.
11. diorama A three-dimensional scene that depicts people, animals, or natural
settings,
commonly used in museums.--EDS.
12. Hornbeck, 70.
13. Hornbeck, 75.
14. Bennett in Hornbeck, 145.
15. Bennett in Hornbeck, 153.
16. G. Stemlieb and J. W. Hughes, eds., Shopping Centers USA (Center for Urban
Policy
Research, Rutgers State U. of NewJersey, 1981).
17. Redstone in Hornbeck, 75.
18. Bennett in Hornbeck, 158
19. W. Kowinski, "The Malling of America," New Times, May 1, 1978: 33.
20. Gruen cited in Harris, 24.
21. Sternlieb, 2.
23. Gruen in Hornbeck, 165.
24. Gruen, 37.
26. Darlow, 38.
27. Gruen, 3.
28. "Cities Are Fun," Time, Sept. 24, 1981: 42.
29. Kowinski, 36.
30. daguerre Named for inventor Louis J. M. Daguerre (1789-1851), an early
method of
photography using chemically treated glass or metal plates.--EDS.
31. Rosann in Horizon, Sept. 1977: 48.
32. Kowinski, 51.
33. Gruen, 48.
34. Architectural Record, April 1976: 136-40.
35. Architectural Record, April 1976: 99-104.
36. New Yorker, Sept. 30, Oct. 6, Oct. 13, 1980.