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.

Artists took over loft spaces in what came to be known as SoHo. (Orbon Alija/E+ via Getty Images)

In the decade after World War II, a two-block-long street called Coenties Slip in Manhattan’s financial district was the center of the art world.

Chryssa, Ellsworth Kelly, Agnes Martin, Lenore Tawney and Robert Indiana lived in narrow brick walk-up buildings on Coenties, its name a relic from when some waterfront streets had actually been boat slips. Barnett Newman lived nearby on Front Street, Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns were around the corner on Pearl. Weavers, painters and sculptors whose work is now hung cheek by jowl at the Whitney and the Museum of Modern Art once dwelled in almost equal proximity, occupying unfinished spaces that sometimes still held the inspirational detritus of departed industries.

Other agglomerations of artists lived uptown, relatively speaking, on the Bowery or near Washington Square Park. But the relentless rise of the postwar economy didn’t leave such enclaves alone for long. New skyscrapers downtown, and the expansion of New York University around the park, created a litany of displacement: evicted 1952, to be torn down; lease terminated; jeopardized by highway.

As the skyline modernized, artists who had not yet found success had to find more space — space with light, space that didn’t need to be kept pristine, space grand enough to hold the oversize canvases and welded constructions that were increasingly au courant. One sculptor, whose tools of choice were scrap steel and an oxyacetylene torch, told The New York Times in 1962, “Who was it that said, ‘First we shape the building and then the building shapes us?’ My loft has turned out the best sculpture I’ve ever done. It’s demanded more of me.”

On Literary Hub, a second excerpt from Meet Me by the Fountain focused on this totally important question.

A stepped, centralized seating area appears, in one form or another, in most malls built in the 1980s. Sometimes there’s a fountain. Sometimes there are plants. Sometimes there is a sculpture. If the mall is multilevel, skylights illuminate the space from above. Escalators traveling between floors make for easy, surreptitious people-watching. Is my friend hanging out at the mall? Is my crush? This is the atrium, the most important interior space of the mall for the adolescent both architecturally and psychologically.

The earliest indoor shopping malls, with their I-shaped, bowling-alley forms, had no centralized place where groups could gather, nor much need for one. But by the early 1970s, and the advent of more complexly laid-out malls in T-, X-, or O-shapes, patrons might wander forever, missing each other in the long, low-ceilinged identical halls. Hence the atrium, which has its own storied architectural history: Ancient Roman houses were centered on open-air or skylit spaces, which provided daylight and breezes to the rooms surrounding them.

These courts often had an impluvium, or fountain, to catch rainwater from the roof, as well as furnishings for outdoor entertaining. In the shopping mall, the atrium serves a similar function, opening up the middle of a building lined with windowless shops; letting in light, water, and plants; and furnished like a living room. The atrium was the center of the social life of the Roman domus and so, too, has it been the center of mall sociability.

Gruen envisioned Southdale as an ersatz town green and, indeed, some of that civic sensibility remains in the symmetry and greenery of mall atriums. But the theatrical aspect of circumnavigating, posing, or performing in that centralized space makes this green seem more like the gossipy New England of Peyton Place than the buttoned-up town squares of earlier American depictions.

Illustration by Ege Soyuer.

It is easy to think of indoor and even outdoor malls as anti-landscape: big asphalt parking lots, blank walls, artificial lighting, manufactured scents, digital sounds. But the origin of mall architecture was in the European 19th-century conservatory, where cast-iron and glass roofs covered expensive, nonnative plants. Early mall innovators like Victor Gruen emphasized the year-round good weather of indoor shopping, and leading landscape architects like Lawrence Halprin made sure the plantings were as up-to-date as the goods for sale.

As America contemplates mass mall die-off — analysts predict that a quarter of the United States’ roughly 1,000 malls will close in the next three to five years — reminding ourselves of the mall’s garden origins offers clues as to how they might be transformed. Some should be demolished and returned to nature, but more should be rethought from an ecological point of view. While malls are a wasteful use of land, replacement with new stand-alone buildings with space-hogging parking lots only compounds that wastefulness: Better to add (perimeter buildings, solar panels, trees) and to swap (markets for department stores, classrooms for boutiques).

Ground cleared and buildings constructed for one kind of community benefit — shopping — could be reduced, reused and recycled to serve a broader and greener community purpose, with pedestrian open space as part of a mix of public uses. While the mall was designed to showcase products intended for obsolescence, in the best-case scenario it is also a building designed to change.

Dayton's Department Store at Southdale, 1956 (courtesy Gruen Associates).

An interview about the book with Martin C. Pederson, one of my first editors (at Graphis and later Metropolis).

Alexandra Lange’s new book, Meet Me by the Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall, is aptly titled. For a book clocking in at a brisk 263 pages, it’s an engaging, elegantly written, and deceptively comprehensive work. Lange is a wonderful critic, so one of the consistent pleasures of the book is the rigor she brings to the mall, as both an architectural idea and a cultural phenomenon. She likes them, even with their very obvious flaws and shortcomings. Recently I talked to Lange about the book, whether malls are a dying building type, and what becomes of them in the future.

MCP: Let’s start where I usually start: the origin story for the book. Tell me why you wanted to write about…a dying building type.

AL: I think “dying building type” is up for debate. That said, there are two different origin stories. One of them is that when I finished my last book, The Design of Childhood, which ends with kids at around 12 years old, I realized that I was starting to get interested in teenagers. I wrote a couple of articles for Curbed about teenagers in public space and teenagers and the public library. The logical third space after that is teenagers and the mall. So that was on my mind. How are we providing for teenagers? Where do teenagers go? Why is there this black hole in the literature about teenagers, even more so than there had been for children, which is why I wrote my other book?

The second part was, I was the architecture critic for Curbed at the time, and I started noticing that people seemed to be building things that were in my mind shopping malls, but they weren’t calling them shopping malls. The most notable example being Renzo Piano’s City Center Bishop Ranch, which is in the greater Bay Area. Of course, Renzo, whenever he does a project, goes on and on about the piazza. And it sounds perfect in his accent.

So he was talking about City Center Bishop Ranch. The architecture was all very tasteful and high end. It’s a wealthy area that doesn’t have a main street. I was looking at the plans and I thought: This is a shopping mall.