From The Guardian, February 23, 2015:
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 – a place that so well offers the paradox of American consumerism with a health-conscious urban elite – 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.
Born and raised in a rural small town in Illinois, Jerde’s interest in crowds and urban spaces could have been credited to the vast amount of time he spent growing up in desolate places. His breakthrough as an architect came in 1977, when he transformed a retail development in San Diego into the Horton Plaza, a mixture of indoor and outdoor spaces bridged by walkways, shops, and an entirely new consumer experience.
Jerde’s architectural premise was supposedly meant to create new environments and experiences for people – replacing “experience” with the marketing of experience. Privately owned shopping malls and theme parks would eventually pave the way toward the big boxification of America, and somewhere in this shift people started mistaking culture for consumerism and vice versa.
Still, malls bring up so many distinct memories from my youth. I remember coercing my mom into driving me to Vernon Hills, a residential area 45 minutes north of the Chicago suburb where I grew up, learned to ride a bike and got my period. I told my mom I was going to meet a new friend at her house; in reality I was finally going to meet with my soon-to-be girlfriend who I had only talked with by phone and on AOL Instant Messenger.
I remember that overcast day, driving with my mom through Midwestern flatlands that surrounded Interstate 90/94 until the landscape shifted, curving deeper into a slightly hilly suburban housing development cluster. There was a sense of desolation there that startled me. There was no center; the mall was the only structure that broke the visual monotony.
I met my internet friend “Rebecca”. We were excited, we made out, and then she suggested we hit the mall. It was the only place where people in this bland suburb seemed to gather – adults for shopping, and teenagers for browsing and navelgazing. We strolled around holding hands and receiving blank or confused stares. I found myself more enthralled and mortified by the rampant consumerism than the onlookers’ reactions to us.
As a teenager, there was this illusion that the mall somehow served the purpose normally assigned to a community meeting center, a local park or neighborhood pool; on the outset, it appeared to be a place designated for hanging out with friends, people watching, shopping, and wasting time.
The mall, I would later learn, was just another example of capitalism, a privately-owned corporate structure that consumers and business-owners alike had no choice but to participate in. The cultural elements of what could have been a thriving downtown area were cut away in favor of consumerism, convenience and suburban living, flattened and packaged into the mall environment.
Jerde might have said that this wasn’t a flattening of culture, but rather a reinvention of the “experience” of a downtown area, simply repackaged and repurposed to resemble something that everyone could enjoy without thinking about too much.
Creating consumer experiences out of public spaces is indeed how Jerde is best remembered; it is an aesthetic experience of the most mudane variety, and indeed his aim was to serve “the common man” rather than “the elite”. When I think back to my teenage self, all I can say is, he did just that.
