Santa Claus with a client at the King of Prussia Mall, December 2022. Mark Makela/Getty Images North America

Santa arrives at the Grove, the outdoor luxury shopping center in Los Angeles’ Fairfax District, in dramatic fashion: His red sleigh, with eight tiny reindeer, arcs over the mall’s central fountain, framing the 100-foot-tall Christmas tree. Reservations are recommended for Santa’s Workshop, decorated to look like the gooiest of gingerbread houses. And despite December temperatures hitting the 60s in LA, faux snow falls nightly at 7 and 8 p.m.

As Americans mark their return to in-person shopping this holiday season, they are also coming back to the mall, where Mariah Carey still reigns, giant baubles hang from the rafters, and Santa presides over his village. Santa, after all, is the spirit of the mall — a little bit nostalgic, a little bit exciting, and a whole lot commercial, with photo sessions starting (at least at the Grove) at $50 for the Holly Jolly package.

This combination of community and commerce has been part of the mall’s DNA since its birth. Southdale, America’s first indoor mall, created a jingle advertising “Southdale’s Wonderland” in 1956, its first year. And yet the mall Santa can also seem entirely now: What could be more 2022 than an immersive Yuletide selfie station?

By Alexandra Lange, Mark Lamster & Carolina A. Miranda

There are big changes here at Awards Central as we deliver our 13th consecutive annual prizes: We are pleased to announce that the most eminent Carolina A. Miranda of the Los Angeles Times has joined our esteemed panel. What does that mean for you? More awards. More geographic diversity. More hilarity. Welcome Carolina!

Moving on to the business at hand: It has been yet another busy, dispiriting, ridiculous, racist, sexist, anti-semitic, and all around stupid year. Which is to say, a lot of material for us. And so….on to the fake awards:

The 2022 Architecture and Design Awards

Golden Anniversary Chalice: The Kimbell Museum, Gund Hall, and Pentagram all hit the big five-oh. Many happy returns.

The Golden Carbuncle Trophy: Charles III is now the literal king of the trads. Will he relocate to Poundbury?

Bye-Bye Birdie Badge: We would have preferred it if Elon Musk immolated his tunnel business, rather than our favorite place to post buildings we can’t stop thinking about. How will architects make friends without Twitter?

Bruno Taut Award: To Miles Bron, Glass Onion’s Musk-esque bro, who decided architecture should resemble an allium.

Photo: Iwan Baan / Illustration: Stephanie Davidson

Courtyard apartments have a long history in the US, particularly in temperate climes, where shaded outdoor corridors and centralized playspaces can be year-round amenities. New York City, however, has only selectively embraced this approach, with private yards and public parks taking up the slack. A new 18-unit condominium, 450 Warren — one of four planned Brooklyn collaborations between architects SO-IL and developers Tankhouse — aims to change that relationship, while also twisting the idea of common outdoor space into something that gets used.

Rather than creating one large courtyard, with the open space protected from the street by an L-shaped plan, SO-IL chopped up the outdoor amenities, betting that smaller, more carefully shaped and planted terraces would be more popular than a large undifferentiated expanse of grass. The building’s plan reads as three towers connected by curvy concrete walkways.

Ani Liu, Untitled (feeding through space and time). Photo by Celeste Sloman

Messy coils of plastic tubing sprawl across the gallery’s concrete floor. The liquid inside—opaque, white with a yellowish tinge—pulses once, twice, and the eye tracks its progress thanks to the air bubbles cycling through the loops. Could that be … milk? Follow the tubing back to an unassuming rectangular box. If it is milk, a panicked brain might ask, where is the mother?

At this moment the mother, artist Ani Liu, is standing by the door of the pocket-­size Cuchifritos Gallery + Project Space in Lower Manhattan, wrapped in a tie-dyed T-shirt dress for tonight’s opening of her solo exhibition, “Ecologies of Care.” But she has also sat, pumping milk, in the broom closet next to her classroom at the University of Pennsylvania; in her basement studio in Queens; on trains and in cars. The volume of milk circulating through Untitled (pumping) and Untitled (feeding through space and time) represents a week of such sessions, or 5.85 gallons—some of the invisible labor of motherhood. It also represents modern breastfeeding technology—specifically, the Spectra pump that allowed Liu the alleged freedom to return to the workplace just weeks after having her first child. After headlines about a national formula shortage earlier this year, the liquid seems even more precious.

The Monroeville Mall, location for Dawn of the Dead, in 2001. © Brett McBean

A fresh excerpt from Meet Me by the Fountain on the undead shoppers of Dawn of the Dead, at Recessed Space.

Why do zombies go to the mall?

This question is asked and answered in George Romero’s 1978 cult classic Dawn of the Dead, the second part of a planned horror trilogy. Four survivors of a zombie attack steal a TV helicopter and head north, making for Canada. As they chopper over fields and roads, they find that the virus has spread past the bounds of the city. Every open space includes dark figures that stagger toward some undefined goal. Low on fuel and sleep, the escapees reach a vast, empty parking lot. “What the hell is it?” someone asks, as if encountering the ruin of an ancient civilization. “Looks like a shopping center, one of those big indoor malls” is the reply.

Although the mall was unrecognizable from the air, once they land the helicopter on the roof and get inside, they know what to do: shop. “It’s Christmastime down there, buddy,” both in the real world they have left behind and the refuge in which they now play. The empty J. C. Penney provides a television, a radio, lighter fluid, chocolate. They turn on the lights, the music, the fountains. A prerecorded announcement breaks into the Muzak: “Why pay more when the sales are popping here?” Why pay more indeed? In the zombie apocalypse, everything is free.