Architecture critic and author, Alexandra Lange joins us today to talk about her latest book, Meet Me By The Fountain: An Inside History Of The Mall. As it's title suggests, Meet Me By The Fountain explores the beginnings and development of the American shopping mall, but rewards our nostalgic gaze with a fascinating look at the mall as architectural challenge and sociological phenomenon. As a response to the changing relationships to consumerism and urban space in the post-World War II period, the shopping mall soared in popularity for Americans in large part because it offered at once a space for consumerist escape and nearly complete environmental and social control. It shaped its won social culture, shot through with all of the prejudices of the world outside but with the promise of experiential transformation. In Meet Me By The Fountain, the shopping mall emerges as a uniquely postmodern public space grounded in the perennial human longing for social connection, and the nostalgia we feel for that space in the present demonstrates its ongoing appeal, even in the present when it is considered to be, if not dead, dying an all-but certain death.
Also, Elvia Wilk, author of the essay collection Death By Landscape, returns to recommend both Marlen Haushofer's 1963 novel The Wall (German: Die Wand) and Ned Beauman's new novel Venomous Lumpsucker.
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