Shpping Malls

..are hotly contested, in the same sense that having the first case of syphilis
might be contested. Was it the Market Square in Lake Forest built in 1916
or the Country Club Plaza in Kansas City in 1922? Perhaps Highland Park Shopping
Village built in 1931 in Dallas, which turned its back on the street and segregated
cars and people?
I think not, for shopping malls are dependent on cars, suburbia and real,
or apparent, prosperity. And for that we look to the 1950s, the era of advertising,
tail fins, rock & roll and exuberant consumerism, those halcyon days when
buying something was an event, not a lifestyle moment.
Ultimately we arrive at the well intentioned, and now well known, Victor Gruen,
a Viennese refugee from Hitler’s Anschluss, who arrived in America in
1938 – the first Gruen transfer.
As an urban planner and European, Gruen intended to create the unhurried sophisticated
ambience of Europe’s central shopping areas, where people gathered,
conversed wisely, exchanged ideas, sipped coffee, ate elegantly and created
civilisation as we might like to know it. Perhaps his mind turned to London’s
Burlington Arcade (built “for the sale of jewellery and fancy articles
of fashionable demand, for the gratification of the public”), or Paris’s
Passage Choiseul, or the iconic Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II in Milan that
links the Piazza del Duomo in Milan to the Piazza della Scala. Perhaps. Refined
and elegant architecturally sympathetic spaces that invite you to stay and
dawdle, that complement the inner you and which feel no need to capture you,
for they know that you will return to be enchanted. Even though the Galleria
Vittorio Emanuele II has had to ingest a McDonald’s, it has done so
with a modicum of dignity. I’m sure the burger taste better there and
they are probably the only thing you can afford.
Melbourne city has many such arcades, varied in aspect and ranging from elegant
to cyber punk, full of curious shops, shadows, shade and interesting people
Gruen’s vision and ambition were thwarted by the economic reality that
people should not be allowed to drift idly along without being quickly and
efficiently parted from their money. Seats should not be so comfortable and
spaces not so inviting that a visitor might be tempted to tarry. Rather the
prospective consumer should be forced to wander from lure to lure, from one
colourful bait to another, until his wallet was hooked, emptied, and returned
gutted.
So it is in Eastland
Externally it presents a combination of multi-story car park and high windowless
walls to the world. Windowless less the visitors be tempted to turn their
eyes to the outside world and boundless sky and be diverted from the slacked-jawed
cornucopia of material opportunity.
This is architecture without style, grace, and without a welcome face to the
world.
Inside, rather than an elegant harmonious space, one is in a Kandy-Koloured
kaleidoscope of competing signage, colour schemes and franchises all screaming
‘Me, Me, Me ! Come here, I’m really, really interesting. Please
love me and give me money.’ The European arcades have smart uniform
shop fronts that create a harmonious space and an architectural unity. The
experience is one more of contemplation and relaxed pleasure.
In Eastland one is left jangling through an unknown psychedelic space trying
to find anything that is familiar from the outside world.
One searches to find some slight mooring for the mind – to somehow come
to terms with the frantic and competing colour schemes, the swaddling cloth
of piped featureless music and the competing smells of cheap perfume and frying
food.
In the obligatory Food Hall haute cuisine does not reign supreme.
Instead we get the standard franchise of factory food. Red Rooster, Ali Barba,
Cafe Moderno, Nandos, Trios and yes, McDonalds. This is not really eating;
this is somewhere for high calorie consumption.
And it shows on the people who crump and waddle around who are obviously working
up for one of those weight reduction programs that prove you can’t get
bad reception when you need it.
But as we left, after dish water coffee and cheese cake made out of rubber,
the coup de grace was the sign on the back window of the Mazda we
passed exiting the car park. ‘Where’s my foreskin?’ it said.
I peered through the dark glass at the driver who looked like a large, florid
English butcher extruding out of clothes two sizes too small.
I wanted to tell him that I knew where his foreskin was, and that he wasn’t
wearing a roll neck sweater..