Longlisted for the Porchlight Business Book Awards
"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."-Vulture
A 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.
