The disconnected source

If galleries separated the automobile from shopping, enclosed shopping centers separated everything else. The enclosed shopping center became its “own world, pulled out of time and space” (Kowinski 60). These centers or theaters, depending on Ira Zepp or William Kowinski, not only cared about themselves but ignored everything around them. As this ideas shifted, the focus became how to make “it” as great as possible. If that meant 25,000 yards of ribbon, 850 pounds of scattered snow and $70,000 later then so be it. The underlying issue here is how these enclosed, protected and controlled centers became less of a place to shop and more of a place to discover “a source of power” and “recharge human energy” (Zepp 37).

These artificial introverted environments became magnets and “special places to regain our identity and to be reconnected” (Zepp 38). The real question is how did they become these special places? I think the radical shift to suburbia chaos on all levels. Convention lost its meaning and people and shopping developers alike were looking for some sense of order and organized. Shopping centers were always a place of organization and the enclosure aspect enabled this organization to occur 24/7/365. These places were organized so much that even the Christmas decorated had blueprints so they could be repeated every year.

There is one problem which these centers. They created order and a sense of community but the experience is on a strictly individual level. When a person walks into this source of power they feel part of something bigger but never fully engage it, they simply observe it. So when I said enclosed shopping centers separated everything else that included an engaged active experience.