The Mall as a Theater

I know we have discussed this issue before, but it seems that the question begins to arise of why must buildings only work to bring in money and not thought of as being the reason people came there. Why can’t architecture be the experience? It seems that experience of architecture is lost and doesn’t really come back to the “mall” or “shopping” experience for quite some time. In fact, it still hasn’t fully re-entered the business of mall design in a widespread sense. As I said though, architecture was only there for profit, not for the experience. Malls and the shopping experience were purely about “the spread of an aesthetic to serve business needs.” (Leach 40) There was a large increase in the sheer volume of businesses showing off and focusing on material concerns and using those concerns as there façade that they wanted to present.

The second issue at hand is that Elbert Hubbard seemed to be one of the first people in this rise of the shopping experience to push us into a realm that truly unified public and private. Glass as a material has the ability to do that of course, in it’s ability to physically enclose a space making in “private” while as being transparent, making it public, and that was a heavily employed material. However, the use of glass is not the only point, it is more the use of the idea that glass represents. Hubbard really wanted the advertising world to be open; there were to be no hidden unknown risqué things. He was essentially encouraging the rise of stores like Victoria secret and the way in which the publicity industry thrives on too much information and the breakdown of public and private, which is virtually non-existent in our society. Hubbard “argued time and again that people should push themselves and their ‘services and commodities’ forward into the public space, push and push, and that the best way to do that was through pictures.” (Leach 42)

On that note they also commented that successful ads are intrusive and invasive. That true publicity and advertisement was in the audiences face breaking down the barriers that separate public and private. With all this talk about public and private unification I find it very interesting that there were so many references to the theater. With the theater, the entire point is to separate public and private. There are facades and forced perspectives, and those seem to me to be more accurate of what I know of advertisement and publicity. Theater and merchandising were both all about a certain kind of display and ordered system of display through which to advertise. The key, as often stated in William Leach’s texts was purely getting people to buy as long as the goods were properly displayed. The quality of goods is rarely mentioned. The quality of the display however, was often the topic of conversation. This is often the case, even in theater. You speak first and foremost of the performance, and then maybe how nice the set looked, but ultimately, the countless other individuals and pieces that went into that show are practically unnoticed by the lay-person. Some “trimmers” like Fraiser, embrace this theatricality and as stated on page 68, “Fraiser was utterly theatrical in his methods.”

Currently I feel as if we are part of the latter. We are immersed in a shopping culture all about display. And no matter how much any modern store wants to attempt to reach out to me and break the public/private divide, it seems that they will be viewed as simply putting on a show, or merely acting on this stage, trying to win me over and all the while I am unaware of the workings backstage.