that i will remember. 2022 wisconsin book festival. every year there's one. and ever alexandra said yes. five months ago i've been talking this book talking to people about the history of the mall as much as i possibly could. and here it is today. i'm delighted. who has been to the mall before? i know there's some people who have been to the mall. fantastic. the mall, as someone who was born in 1980, was the center culture for me growing up in oconomowoc and we didn't have one. we had to go to brookfield. i think that i'm not alone. i talk about how important the mall was to me in certain group of formative years, and i am delighted to see people of all ages here so we can get a wide variety of people who say the modern mean anything to me or i was alive and an adult when they invented the mall and it's ridiculous or whatever they're going to say this book is a fascinating cultural history. it is a fascinating architectural history. we know from meet me by the fountain. people didn't used to have cell phones. you just had to kind of go and believe they were going to be there for you and maybe there'd be like an in sync or new kids on the block going on, depending on how good your mall was at the time. i want you to put your hands together and please help me welcome alexandra lange. seemed like a form of architecture that everyone had seen, and so they would be motivated to learn more and understand better and then once i got into my research as, you'll see a little bit today i found out there were so many things that could be explained in and around the mall that it was like an even bigger topic than i initially realized. and that's just like what makes any book project really fun. so, so just a little bit about myself. so i'm a design critic and this is fourth book, my previous book was called the design of childhood. and like one of the things that i learned a lot about for that book was children's. so after i speak here, i definitely want to go down and check out the children's room and library because it's kind of something that i collect in my head. my book was published june and it covers the history of indoor shopping malls from the 1950s to the present and each chapter of the book really covers decade in the life of malls, from invention to some demolition. and the last chapter suggests a lot of ideas about how to repurpose malls for our, you know, digital possibly future. i'm sure here wisconsin there are a number of examples of dead or dying malls. and one of the things i hope people leave my book and maybe leave here today with is the idea that malls can have a second life or sometimes a third life and they don't to just be what they have always been. so i first had the idea for this book in 2018 when i read about the italian architect renzo piano's involvement with a project called city center. bishop out in san ramon, california. that's like in the greater bay area in northern california, the word city center were in the name of the project. but when looked at the map, it didn't seem to be that close to any cities and piano himself kept calling a piazza in his beautil italian accent. but this an italian hill town and i suspected and my research later proved that this was, in fact, a mall. but why did no one want to call it a mall so cut to almost four years later. and my book that in part answers that question by linking malls to fashion cycle like malls are made for the same kind of disposable reality in a sense that, the clothes that are sold inside them are so once upon once the defining news narrative of shopping centers became dead malls after the 2007 recession. a lot of developers. wanted to distance themselves from word mall, if not from the architectural typology of shops around the central square, which is an ancient typology. so i also found once i dug into it, that there are lots of malls that are alive well, but maybe an equal number that are dead and dying. so this is really is a story about some things that are alive and some things that are dead. and i think a lot of people just want to separate things into categories. one or the other, a or b, and really it's both. so as i write in the book mall architecture was really made for malleability. it was made to change. unlike lots of other buildings, the mall is a framework for other smaller architectures. anchor tenants like department boutiques, food counters, kiosks that be able to swap businesses in and out easily. the mall exterior, which is typically blank except for fun science like this one is timeless and easily updated with new signage. and it seemed to me that by borrowing into the past of the mall, it's best designers its original intentions, its 70 year legacy at this point i could help both the mall lovers and the mall haters figure out what to do with these ubiquitous structures. so for the rest of my speaking time today, i'm going to take you through some architectural in the history of the mall. and after that i'm happy to take any questions that you have. so there are many states that claim credit for being, you know, the originators of the mall and california is actually one of them the. california mall story begins westchester which was then a new aerospace industry suburb of los angeles. and it begins with the design of what was actually a freestanding department store. the man typically and i think correctly credited with inventing the shopping mall, was a man named victor. he was born in vienna and he fled the nazis and emigrated to new york in 1938. his first job was working for the industrial designer norman bell. geddes on what would become the futurama pavilion for general motors at the 1939 world's fair, which can see here that pavilion is notable for mall history for two reasons. number o, it has a 35,000 square foot model of. what the usa would look like in the year 1960. so, you know, 41 years in the future. and it was a model because it was for general motors that included downtown skyscrapers, suburban housing, 14 lane highways and a heck of a lot of cars to the exterior of the pavilion. it was designed as a stream object itself with long snaking up the exterior and iding the huge crowds that came into the building. so this is basically like early disney or trader joe's organizing the line architecture when a decade later guru and his first wife designer elsie crumb, were asked to design a freestanding department store for westchester, california. they were obviously thinking back to this world's fair experience in terms of the design that department store millie barnes was a mid-priced store and it was ahead of the curve in realizing that the market for their wares was moving out of downtowns. all the women living in those little single family houses that were being in california and lots of places, the war we're going to need a place to shop, but while they had arrived at downtown department stores by street car and bus these stores were only accessible by car, so than surrounding this brand new store with even more giant parking lot grew and in it turned of the parking lot into a promenade drivers x access top floor entrance. as you can see here through these dramatic crisscross ramps and up on the top floor. there was also a nursery for children and a restaurant with a view of the surrounding suburb at street level. they created this series of display windows which were set at an angle to the sidewalk so that they could be seen both by pedestrians walking by and by who were speeding by. the outside, as you can see, is pretty plain, except for the giant mclaren's logo. so the the giant logo really became the model for department stores attached to stop shopping malls, which tend to be solid, windowless with a big logo at the scale of the highway and came to think of them as a giant version, the store shopping bag, which basically looks the same but mclarens despite having all of these facilities embedded in it, was only one building and a years later grew and was contacted by the dayton family of minneapolis their department store, dayton's, which is now the target company was a traditional downtown anchor store, but by the early 1950s they had begun to see a downturn. their business, like the store owners in many other cities, hudson's in detroit, neiman marcus and dallas, they realized that they were going to have to open stores in the suburbs, but they wanted to exert design and control over the surroundings for their stores. and that's it grew and came in. he offered modern design with a sensibility and the design for a shopping mall that was centered on a plaza that was meant to remind shoppers of main street or the town square or even the bustling streets of his native vienna. you can see that design in this bird's eye view with the black sky indicating the central plaza. it was also surrounded by two department stores and then two smaller bands of individual shops. the mall was an improvement on the town square. however because as the advance press for southdale mentioned, the first indoor shopping mall offered 365 shopping days a year in climate controlled comfort. and in minnesota. and i think the same must be true in wisconsin state for like deep snow in the winter and very humid summers. the idea of having all of these other days in which would be pleasant to shop was really a big selling point to kind of underline this point. the central open space at southdale was known as the garden of perpetual spring, and it featured plants and fountains. it had a carousel, it had an which is the kind of cylindrical structure that you can see in this photo. aviaries were very popular early malls which i can't really imagine that now. and it also had two sculptures by the important sculpture. sculptor harry bertoia, which are still in place. and bertoia a fair amount of mall sculpture and a lot of other ones are also, you know, scattered america. those sculptures are as the golden trees. again, underlining this kind of indoor nature theme. so southdale was a huge hit. national press covered the opening as if it was major suburban breakthrough which i would argue it was and grew associate soon had more work they could handle over the design of the mall would mature the pinwheel plan that southdale was designed on would be discarded in favor of much simpler, more easily replicable plans. the simplest version of that really shaped like a capital i with one department store at end, and then a double run of shops going between them. typically there would be planters and benches down the center, off and under a skylight. but this simple version could also dressed up and throughout the 1960s, some of the country's best architects experimented with the mall as a site of invention. a great example. this is north park center in dallas, which was built in 1964 by the developers ray patsy nasher. and it's still by their daughter, nancy there's a whole interesting saga there, really only about ten malls that are still under family ownership in the u.s. today. and many of them are, in fact the most successful models. north park is one of them. south coast plaza, kind of between l.a. and san diego is another in outside detroit, somerset collection, which is owned by the forbes family. another one of those family owned malls, north park was originally l-shaped with one department store at each end and one at the corner. and the architect in north park, e.g. hamilton, designed the mall to have a very elegant, minimalist structure of white brick, polished concrete floors. d there's a little flower shaped in the corner of the frame of. every storefront whichou can kind of see by the tea and tapers in this image. so the idea was thhe could come and go, you know, none of the stores you see in this piure are stillround, but that the architecture would remain the same and would remain kind ofntouched by the passage of time. so i would say north park, you know, still looks like this, which is kind of amazing. and that's partially thanks to careful maintenance and partially due the devotion of the family to keeping the mall up when north park doubled in size in 2006, the new from the same firm actually. repeated and updated the original of some materials they have glass railings now, which you couldn't have had in 1965. but white brick, the concrete and those little bug pieces all stayed the a grand or model for the mall was. the arcades and galleries that up in the mid-19th century i the u.s. and the united states thanks to advances in cast iron and glass technology. the granddaddy of all of those galleries is the galleria vittorio emanuele in milan, which gave its name and form to dozens of models with long barrel vaulted glass roofs. i've found as i've gone to different places, the gallery is often the nicest mall in a town and a lot of them look, i think just like this example in houston with just the super long glass, you know, running for several blocks. but the houston galleria w actually the first of this style of mall in 1970, and it was by the visionary developer gerald hines, and designed by joe obata of oak is a st louis firm. hines post, which was the area in which the galleria was built as the node of a new urban. he was really trying to create a second downtown for houston and the galleria, which also pioneered the mall ice skating rink, was anchored. two department stores, including this neiman marcus, which had a design inspired by le corbusier's latourette, which is a monastery which is obviously a very ironic reference. i mean, i also think the ice skating rink is funny because like, okay, you're building a mall in or wisconsin and you have the gall, the garden, perpetual spring, but you build a mall in texas and you have an ice skating rink year round. so it's like, let's flip, flip the seasons on their head. the galleria also anchored, ongoing and really successful use development, which includes hotels, housing offices and a sports club that has a track on the roof that goes around the outside of the skylight. so when the history of architecture design we often focus on the designer or architect, the author of the work but a little bit different when it comes to the history of malls. victor gruen was trained as an architect and. he worked as a designer during the early of his career. but once malls took off, his real role really more that of a salesman of the concept, like a lot of people have asked me, you know, what, victor gruen, so successful because there were other developers doing same thing. and honestly, you know, part of it comes down to personal charisma. you know, i feel like if he were a developer now, you know, maybe would be on tech talk, he would definitely all over the business channels talking because you can tell by the coverage of him at the time that he you know, he would say anything. he would for heroic photos. he was very willing to be a media personality personality. he actually had a partner named larry smith who, you know, nobody ever mentions was an economist. and they worked together to make the financial argument for malls that would appeal civic leaders and bankers and real estate people while he, like the developers, you know, used architectural renderings to speak to communities about the beauties of the mall. so there are a number of charismatic developers in the mall story from the gnashers in dallas to hines in texas to james rose, who i'll speak about in a moment, about more and beyond, hines began as a solo office tower developer, but in projects like the galleria and houston, and one just after in dallas. he expanded his scope to city making putting malls the center of new mixed use neighborhoods. this promotional brochure that i'm showing you here was something thate owed around to potential investors before the design was finished. you can see that this doesn't have the skylight. but what interests me about the brochure that it treats post oak as if it were already a place it's sort of like, you know way peop use photo realistic renderings today and the brochure really presents the galleria as kind of a theme park of life where everything is taken care of under one roof everything is fun it's a mall utopia with ice skaters and the carousel and the fancy circus banners gallery is really created a bridge between the architect of the past and the present and many of the new galleria shape shopping malls that built in the seventies, eighties and nineties were built into existing cities are a great example of this is the eaton center in toronto, which above a huge transit hub. and it's really the heart of a city again, a place like toronto gets very cold in the winter. so everybody to, you know, make eir transit pass so they can cut through the eaton center and the galleria form really becomes the look of choice for developers and architects who are trying to make downtown shopping competitive with the suburban shopping malls, westside square in los angeles is example of the style of mall, and it was highly effectively as annterior setting in clueless, there's one chapter of my book where i talk about teen movies because they have so often and so effectively been set at malls and the experience of in movies actually syncs pretty closely with the experience of real life teens. movies are a great shorthand to talk that in the book i talk about how mall atriums are essentially catwalks and feel like this scene in which cher and christian jung kind of the most beautiful kids in school, ascend on this escalator up towards the light of the skylight in the mall. really makes the point about how the architecture is set up to showcase people and showcase certain kinds of activities. but by the early 1980s, the suburban mall formula of shopping, a pinch of entertainment like the carousel or the skating rink needed an update. it had been tired and people weren't really willing to travel as far for things anymore. so this is where a california named john gertie comes in. gertie had built a fair number of cookie cutter malls, including the glendale galleria, and he that the entertainment part, the mall experience should be brought to the foreground rather than remaining in the background. and he was very dismissive of the tasteful european styling of the galleria. he thought malls should be fun and they should look like fun. his first attempt to do this was, horton plaza in san diego, which is an indoor outdoor mall. given the nice climate and diego and it was built over part of the city's historic downtown and its design and to resemble a hollywood version of an italian hill town with stripe palazzo like buildings that you might find in siena and lots and lots of level changes. but gertie took that idea the mall as entertainment much with the mall of america which was for a time the largest mall in the usa which centers on an actual park and has four wings themed differentorities. the idea was, you know children thrills for the kids and a taste of sophistication. the adults again all under climate controlled roof at the mall of america, had all of the regular shopping for department stores and two levels of specialty shops. but there was also enough to do you could fly to minneapolis for the weekend and never leave the mall. and in the first kind of flush of excitement about, the mall of america people did that. there were flights to minneapolis just for the mall, essentially from all over the usa. the section i'm showing you here with the green metal rf and indoor streetlamps, market street was supposed to look like a sort of european with little stalls on the ground floor selling food, handmade gifts like an brick lined street. the developers of the mall of america, 555 group had previously the west edmonton mall in which had even more extravagant themes, including indoor pirate ship and it kind of makes me sad today that their more recent projects, the american drea