Author: Lange, Alexandra

Binding: Hardcover

Number Of Pages: 320

Release Date: 14-06-2022

Details: About the Author Alexandra Lange is an architecture critic and the author of four previous books, including The Design of Childhood. Her writing has also appeared in publications such as The New Yorker, The Atlantic, New York Magazine, the New York Times, and T Magazine, and she has been a featured writer at Design Observer, an opinion columnist at Dezeen, and the architecture critic for Curbed. She holds a PhD in twentieth-century architecture history from the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University and has taught design criticism there and at the School of Visual Arts. She lives in Brooklyn. Product Description “A smart and accessible cultural history.”―Los Angeles Times“A fantastic examination of what became the mall … envision[ing] a more meaningful public afterlife for our shopping centers.”―VultureA portrait--by turns celebratory, skeptical, and surprisingly moving--of one of America’s most iconic institutions, from an author who “might be the most influential design critic writing now” (LARB).Few places have been as nostalgized, or as maligned, as malls. Since their birth in the 1950s, they have loomed large as temples of commerce, the agora of the suburbs. In their prime, they proved a powerful draw for creative thinkers such as Joan Didion, Ray Bradbury, and George Romero, who understood the mall’s appeal as both critics and consumers. Yet today, amid the aftershocks of financial crises and a global pandemic, as well as the rise of online retail, the dystopian husk of an abandoned shopping center has become one of our era’s defining images. Conventional wisdom holds that the mall is dead. But what was the mall, really? And have rumors of its demise been greatly exaggerated?In her acclaimed The Design of Childhood, Alexandra Lange uncovered the histories of toys, classrooms, and playgrounds. She now turns her sharp eye to another subject we only think we know. She chronicles postwar architects’ and merchants’ invention of the mall, revealing how the design of these marketplaces played an integral role in their cultural ascent. In Lange’s perceptive account, the mall becomes newly strange and rich with contradiction: Malls are environments of both freedom and exclusion--of consumerism, but also of community. Meet Me by the Fountain is a highly entertaining and evocative promenade through the mall’s story of rise, fall, and ongoing reinvention, for readers of any generation. Review “A smart and accessible cultural history―outlining the social, economic and architectural forces that led to the creation of U.S. malls as we know them . . . Lange doesn’t have a false nostalgia for malls. Meet Me by the Fountain is frank about how they have usurped public space. But at a time when malls still serve the function of bringing us together, Lange’s book is a thoughtful guide to helping them do what the best of them already have―but better.” ―Los Angeles Times“Artfully elucidates the 70-year history of the mall ... Lange asserts that malls, as ‘blank boxes in the middle of the big empty parking lots,’ can ‘serve as a land trust’ for the 21st century. This sounds like a stretch, but it proves to be true. Some malls die, but most don’t…Ms. Lange’s elegant conclusion: The mall is dead; long live the mall.” ―Wall Street Journal“A fantastic examination of what became the mall. Combining architecture’s past with her own, Lange reflects on the malls of her adolescence and in turn prompts you to think about the ones you grew up around. A lot of things come to mind: glossy tiled floors, the glow of a backlit store map, tinny-sounding Muzak on echoey overhead speakers, whiffs of cinnamon buns and orange chicken. Lange shows us how these things become collective memories in the U.S., then looks abroad to envision a more meaningful public afterlife for our fallen shopping centers.” ―Vulture“[Meet Me by the Fountain] shines in its study of malls as symbols, and drivers, of American consumerism and urban sprawl . .

EAN: 9781635576023

Package Dimensions: 9.7 x 6.5 x 1.1 inches

Languages: English