Starving the mall rats

Dead malls are being studied by the Labelscar project.

It's a nice part of the American Gothic.  There's the zombie movie echo.  There's the Great Recession.  An American Ballard riff.

Personally, malls have always terrified me.  Brutal slabs of construction are what I saw before the gaudy/pretty bits inside.  The vast stretches of space were nightmarish, Ballardian in a dystopian way.

(via MetaFilter)

Comments

[prakash]

Thanks for your information.!! :)

[Andy Havens]

I find malls oddly comforting. Not from the outside, no. Most of the exterior architecture is horrid.

But inside, they're closer to the "town square" than anything we've got left out here in the ExUrbs. It's fun to watch families with their kids playing on the mini, indoor playground... the herds of tweens forming and reforming their social groups...

The noise level also turns into a comforting melange of social and economic banter for me. It is, as I said, peaceful.

Then again, I've always enjoyed graveyards, too. So me finding it peaceful doesn't mean it ain't gothic.

And a mall poem for your day:

http://www.tinkerx.com/writing/stucco-thicket/