The world’s first indoor mall was meant to usher in a utopian America. But its creator, an Austrian who had fled the Nazis, came to believe a nightmare had been unleashed that ‘destroyed our cities’
very day will be a perfect shopping day,” cooed the adverts for America’s first indoor mall when it opened in Edina, Minnesota, in 1956. Edina is blanketed by snow and ice in winter, and baked by unbearably humid heat in summer.Inside its crisp, white, rectangular blocks lay neat parades of shops arranged around a three-storey Garden Court of Perpetual Spring, where 50ft eucalyptus trees rose towards high windows and exotic vines tumbled from balconies overhead.
In the eyes of design critic Alexandra Lange, the caricature of the mall as malevolent place-wrecker is not quite not so straightforward. In her new book, Despite occupying so many sprawling acres of the US landscape, malls have received little critical attention. Like, the subject of her last book, Lange notes that “the mall was ubiquitous and underexamined and potentially a little bit embarrassing as the object of serious study”. They are a compromised and often architecturally despised form, she writes, an ersatz version of a more ancient high street.
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