Lange provides a smart and accessible cultural history — outlining the social, economic and architectural forces that led to the creation of U.S. malls as we know them. But she also looks forward ... Meet Me by the Fountain isn’t just a timeline of dudes with visions of malls dancing in their heads ... Lange has a perceptive eye for how spaces are designed — and for whom ... Lange examines what malls have meant for women as sites of professional advancement and how mall design — with its broad doors, gentle ramps, plentiful seating and generous air conditioning — can make them hospitable places for seniors to socialize ... A particularly intriguing thread in Meet Me By the Fountain examines malls’ complicity in segregation ... Lange doesn’t have a false nostalgia for malls. Meet Me by the Fountain is frank about how they have usurped public space. But at a time when malls still serve the function of bringing us together, Lange’s book is a thoughtful guide to helping them do what the best of them already have — but better.
[Lange] considers the all-too-familiar retail and 'lifestyle centers' to be 'ubiquitous and underexamined and potentially a little bit embarrassing as the object of serious study.' She then proceeds to examine them, thoroughly, seriously and in an engaging fashion ... A particular strength of Ms. Lange’s book is her canny appreciation of the mall’s resilience ... Ms. Lange’s elegant conclusion: The mall is dead; long live the mall.
... a well-researched introduction to the rise and fall and dicey future of an American institution ... Lange is evocative when it comes to the affective elements of mall culture, but her book is occasionally weighed down with cluttering detail ... When a nonfiction book bends under the weight of data dumping, I tend to fault the editor rather than the writer. Spending years neck-deep in archives can cause a perspectival shift in which every detail becomes a darling. That’s the point at which a cleareyed editor should swoop in with advice about which ones to kill ... Still, this book is a useful survey, and Lange opens plenty of avenues for readers to wander down.
... challenges the dominant narrative ... Lange’s book reminds us that the mall has helped shape American society, and has evolved with our country since the 1950s. And she posits that there’s still a place for malls in our society, as long as they adapt to better serve their communities ... Lange’s ultimate vision for reusing the space of malls might be one that largely repudiates a singular focus on commercialism, but she doesn’t discount shopping and what it can do for us.
A question kept nagging me as I read Meet Me by the Fountain—one that Lange answers but not, I think, completely convincingly: Should malls be saved? She says yes, making the case that 'the mall is neither a joke nor a den of zombies, but a resource. America’s dead malls represent millions of square feet of matériel that are not going to be reabsorbed without investment and effort.' This is an important point: No one is served by hulking, decaying structures, least of all the people who live nearby, and Lange details some fascinating examples of adaptive reuse, including one former shopping center that’s been transformed into an Austin Community College campus ... But while she’s defensive about those who catalog dead malls with glee, I understand the impulse—although my take has always been more of a lament. Instead of multiple shopping centers with similarly sterile interiors, why couldn’t my suburban hometown have had theaters, a skate park, nature trails, and more sidewalks? We all need places to go to sit among strangers and bump into friends, but I wish I’d been given more opportunities to do so that weren’t linked to commerce or set to the sounds of Muzak or Top 40 pop.
Where the book fails to go is equally fascinating. As with the skyscraper, the mall is an architectural form pioneered by the US but arguably fully realised elsewhere. Lange takes us to Latin America and to the brilliant, desolate brutalism of Cumbernauld in Scotland, but not to Dubai, where the mall, with its ski slopes, has become the city centre.
The empty mall is the specter that haunts Lange’s book ... What might bloom in the husks of dead or dying malls might not be squalor, Lange writes, but opportunity.
Lange turns a nostalgic but clear eye on the shopping mall as an icon of consumerism intimately linked with the American Dream ... This thorough, culturally aware history will surprise and inspire audiences who may feel they already know the story of the shopping megaplex and provides a tour not of malls themselves, but of what they have meant to the people who gather in them ... She fully hits her stride when boiling down the synergy between spatial design elements and the evolution of U.S. culture ... As she illuminates all that malls have been and can yet be, her hope and optimism for more diverse and sustainable mall uses will inspire readers to see these behemoth structures as a vital and versatile resource for the future.
Lange is attentive to the ways in which twentieth-century visions of the mall as a kind of town square were deliberately conceived to keep out people of color and of lower incomes. This reminder of how the smells, sights, sounds, and spatial layout of the nation’s malls are carefully controlled is an important counterpoint to the highly individualized experiences that animate them.
Lange pulls on an especially interesting thread: how malls and fine art often merged ... The book highlights the ways in which the tensions and critiques of the shopping mall go beyond consumerism or “bad” design.
Deeply researched ... The author covers a great deal of ground, and while her narrative sometimes threatens to become a data dump, there are numerous fruitful avenues to explore ... The mall is dead—but it may yet live again, as Lange’s instructive book capably shows.
