In The Design of Childhood, acclaimed writer, architecture critic, and historian Alexandra Lange uncovered the histories of toys, classrooms, and playgrounds. Lange now turns her sharp eye to another subject we thought we knew. Chronicling the invention of the mall by postwar architects and merchants, Lange reveals how the design of these marketplaces played an integral role in their cultural ascent. Meet Me By the Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall (Bloomsbury, 2022) is Lange’s perceptive account of how these shopping centers became strange and rich with contradiction. In it, Lange describes America’s malls as places of freedom and exclusion—but also as places of undeniable community, and rampant consumerism.
Few places have been as nostalgized, or as maligned, as shopping malls. Since their birth in the 1950s, they have loomed large as temples of commerce. 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 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, anyway? And have rumors of its demise been greatly exaggerated?
Here’s Episode 40: The Big Table conversation with architecture critic, writer, and historian Alexandra Lange, discussing Meet My by the Fountain.
Reading by Alexandra Lange
Music by OMD
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Episode 54: Prudence Peiffer
Episode 53: Two Poets in Conversation
Episode 52: A Chapter about Slime
Episode 51: Lost Objects: 50 Stories About the Things We Miss & Why They Matter
Episode 50: dublab: Live from NeueHouse
Episode 49: Tim Carpenter
Episode 48: Steven Heller
Episode 47: Bruce Adams
Episode 46: Darryl Pinckney's Literary Education
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Episode 44: Ingrid Rojas Contreras
Episode 43: Hua Hsu
Episode 42: Nick Drnaso
Episode 41: Ada Calhoun and Frank O'Hara, Her Father and the New York School of Poets and Painters
Episode 39: Ben Shattuck on Thoreau
Episode 38: Paul Morley on Tony Wilson
Episode 37: Mark Rozzo on Dennis Hopper and Brooke Hayward in 1960s L.A.
Episode 36: Dan Charnas on J Dilla
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