“I’m looking for subtle signifiers of an exuberant bygone optimism,” [Photographer Tag Christof] said. “Whether people realize it or not, the things I photograph are the direct result of a system that defines progress only in economic terms.” Christof...has spent the last five years crisscrossing the country in an effort to document architectural sites vanishing from the landscape. — The Outline
Whether you spent your teenage years moodily occupying the food court or have experienced malls primarily as ruin porn, the architectural significance of these former bustling commercial centers can't be overstated. A kind of high water mark of capitalism, the shuttered and demolished malls... View full entry
In this article on the Huffington Post, Lance Hosey writes about the horror of watching white surpremacists marching in the Charlottesville Downtown Mall on August 11th and 12th of this year. The Mall, which was significantly redesigned in the 1970s, serves as a unavoidable visual reminder of the... View full entry
Its architecture is painfully lost in its own time and its updates only confuse by neither integrating well into the original structure or standing out as truly contemporary. The pink kiosks, orange tiles, teal chairs and green paneled rooms, the purple plush seating in the JC Penny dressing room, and the bright blue tiered entryways are, along with other decor flourishes, seemingly random, with no coherent pattern. — NewCo Shift
Declaring that "the dying mall narrative" already peaked a few years ago, Tag Hartman-Simkins decides to photographically zero in on the details of an old mall in Galesburg, Illinois that is about to be torn down and replaced with an updated, outdoor mixed-use space. His careful observations of... View full entry
Sometime in the not too distant future we will look back at traditional malls as an anachronism – something that started with the post World War II move to the suburbs, peaked in 1990, and faded away, according to the billionaire Los Angeles developer Rick Caruso, whose properties include the Grove and the Americana at Brand.
Millions of dollars are being spent on refurbishing and renovating malls in Los Angeles in an attempt to offer online shoppers an incentive to go outdoors. According to this report by KPCC, the big-league mall masterminds, including Grove guru Rick Caruso, are purposefully trying to redesign malls... View full entry
With their sustainable growth slowing down, things didn't look good at all for the future of Turkey's malls. [...]
With interest in city conservation growing, a popular opposition against gentrification projects rising, and a newborn curiosity for the country's Ottoman-era buildings being threatened by construction companies, talking positively about shopping malls came to be considered sacrilegious from 2013 on.
— psmag.com
More on Istanbul's architecture:Istanbul’s introverted megaspacesIstanbul's 'illegal' towers to be demolished after landmark court rulingAn urbanist's guide to Istanbul: ‘We live in a giant construction site’Gezi Park: Architecture and the Aestheticization of Politics View full entry
I love the mall as much as I love the urban walking experience, museums and movie theaters. Today the stripmall is not just a part of my everyday life in Los Angeles [...] it is also a memory from my own suburban adolescence growing up in Illinois.
Jon Jerde, the LA architect both celebrated and loathed for his role in spreading shopping malls across US suburbia, died this month. Some might scoff at his life’s achievement. I am not one of them.
— theguardian.com
Previously: Jon Jerde, founder and chairman of The Jerde Partnership, has died View full entry
[The American shopping mall] has its own traceable lineage, from the earliest planned shopping centers to the first regional hubs for shoppers traveling by car, to the novel post-war enclosed malls of Victor Gruen [...]
Malls, in short, have spread across the American landscape -- and defined it -- with remarkable success, adapting to our changing tastes along the way.
— washingtonpost.com
The below animation shows the spread of shopping malls across the U.S. throughout the twentieth century, and was created by Sravani Vadlamani, a doctoral student in transportation engineering at Arizona State University. Including numbers of strip, outlet, indoor and outdoor malls, growth really... View full entry
Shopping malls around the country are dropping like flies. Roughly a third have trouble keeping the lights on. And estimates from Green Street Advisors suggest 10 percent of indoor malls will go dark within a decade, due to changing consumer tastes.
But some malls are putting up a fight, even with one foot in the grave.
— marketplace.org
Designers in Buffalo have proposed stripping down a mall to its foundation and reinventing it as housing, while an aspiring architect in Detroit has proposed turning a mall’s parking lot there into a community farm. Columbus, Ohio, arguing that it was too expensive to maintain an empty mall on prime real estate, dismantled its City Center mall and replaced it with a park. — nytimes.com
