They could have just watched Romero's Dawn of the Dead instead :)

Seriously though, very interesting. It certainly raises questions about the blurring of public spaces and private spaces. Along the same lines, Naomi Klein writes about this in her book "No Logo."

we go to the mal for run day and heart smart. then we have maxi squiggles at the food court. those pople sound like fun. maybe they could get a pass like the multiplex and then they could stay longer. i would live their but all my stuff is at home.

good job, ms. davis - i was thoroughly entranced by the story. not sure how i missed it, but this is the first i've heard of it. a short trip to townsend's and yoto's web site was also enlightening and fun.

as someone who has been in a mall maybe four or five times within the past four years, i'm not exactly the typical mall-goer. however, i grew up with "shopping centers" as they moved towards outside experiences to the near-hermetically sealed experiences we have now, so i've had my mall-fill as the years have passed.

my problem these days with malls is they are damn expensive and i can find cheaper/inexpensive and more suitable stuff at local thrift shops and/or specialty stores. i am older, and therefore, oblivious to the pressures of "must-haves" that the mall trades in.

additionally, i am reminded as i write this of the SNL skits of life in the mall - a bored gilda at the scotch tape store. classic. now if townsend, a tape artist, could have somehow also opened up his art gallery at the mall while simultaneously and secretly living there while watching gilda on videotape performing the tape sketch. . . it would have been a full circle experience.

i'm only half-kidding.

i look forward to reading their book.

Honestly, I don't get it. These folks' enterprise was novel, but what did they come away with? They love the mall? They hate the mall? We never find out what they really think or why. The author seems to be in on something we don't know.

Maybe I'm biased since I almost never visit a mall (last time was two years ago I think), and generally view them as soulless places that exploit our baser inclinations toward consumption. I understand the temptation to paint them as the modern town square, but they are anything but. As the author notes: privately owned, and thus subject to all manner of rules, censorship and surveillance.

My town is in the process of tearing down the local mall to replace the downtown street it ate all those years ago. I'm looking forward to another block of shops, restaurants and bars that offer an alternative to the Olive Gardens and Appplebees.

With a slight squeeze of my buttocks I redefined the air quality in a city hall elevator the other day. I am an artist hear me roar!

Mr. Gruen was largely misunderstood. His rather grand ideas for enclosed shopping spaces were, in the end, almost always eviscerated by developers looking to maximize short-term profits. The average mall was so bland by the time the bean counters finished with it that it bore little to no resemblance to the European piazzas he had dreamed to replace (he was an Austrian, after all). He himself came to speak poorly of malls by his later days.

Of course, even Gruen completely misunderstood just how destructive the private automobile would be. His firm drafted numerous redevelopment plans for struggling downtowns in the 1960's. Two I can think of off of the top of my head, Buffalo, NY and Portland, ME, resulted in highway-type roads that obliterated park space and neighborhoods alike. Of course, the displaced were usually poor, and, ironically (given Gruen's status) immigrants themselves.

We are now seeing a return to more "traditional" styles of retail and commercial development, especially in higher income bracket zip codes that support the construction of expensive structured (and therefore, unseen) parking. The collapse of the mall and the move to big boxes, which eschewed any attempt to create public space, has just proven to be too much for a significant segment of the market.

In the end, these new developments are as much a reflection of the increasing income stratification that is emblematic of the times. The well-to-do need not fear seeing the Wal-Mart crowd at these places, as those in lower incomes cannot afford such largess.

The first modern mall, The Arcade, is also in Providence. A sturdy Greek Revival style structure that from the outside looks like a Greek temple, it was built way back in 1828. It is the prototype of the typical American mall, including Providence Place. You could say they were ahead of their times:

http://www.brightridge.com/pages/arcade.html

Few could argue that for many senior citizens, the mall has indeed become the social utopia and gathering place that was meant to embrace all demographic groups. In most malls I have visited, with the lone exceptions being very upscale malls that proffer only very high-end goods, senior citizens come together to meet with people their age, have coffee in the food courts, enjoy whatever entertainment or sales pitches/promotions are going on and otherwise find social stimulation in air-conditioned comfort. It's not so surprising really that mall developers are now including living space within the mall; they've been building condominiums for senior citizens right next door in many places of middle America and Canada for a long time now. My grandparents used to love going to the mall - it was their top social hangout, bar none!

This was a great article, and many among Providence's art scene (RISDE and Brown students, mostly) had known about Townsend and Yoto's project.

However, to further understand a bit more about their motivation, know this: Like many "what were they thinking" architectural projects, the Providence Place Mall begs to be understood. It sits, hulking and imposing, in what should have been an area of pedestrian renaissance in downtown Providence. The mall faces (and weirdly straddles) the river, has an entrance directly off the freeway, and is utterly out of scale with the rest of the neighborhood. Its entrances and exits are almost impossible to find once you're inside.

Given the mystery of it, Yoto and Townsend were basically doing post-modern archeaology with Nordstrom's swapped out for Tut's tomb.