mr. zepp, who are you?

The most bazaar and intriguing reading thus far this semester is Ira G Zepp’s “The Shopping Mall as Sacred Space.” His text categorizes current architectural practioners and theoreticians Rem Koolhaas and Keller Easterling, possibly the entirety of the discipline as “cynical”, rational, realists. It was hard to suspend disbelief or accept the “could be” of this text. With that said, I could access his discussion of Smithhaven Mall, in Smithtown, Long Island. I spent a lot of consuming time there, considering I resided twenty minutes due east in a small town titled Shoreham. Upon the entrance, I don’t discover the significant mall entrance as identified by Zepp. I enter [and touch] the first physical object of the exterior that is reflective of human scale; a 7’ tall aluminum frame glass doorway that punctures the typically windowless, concrete mall enclosure. Densities of cars more easily locate entrances to malls.

Strategies for mall formal organizations seem as purely functional consumption machine decisions. The crossings of lanes act as a means for fire safety and ease of access to parking. Any “existential center” is mashed by multitudes of sensory stimuli. It reminds me of what the suburbs lack, human interaction, beyond the daily service dialogues of purchasing gas, or ordering fast food. The mall is our interface, sensually an urban collective experience. We go to the centers to witness all the chaos and drama, the lacking of so many suburban lifestyles. Malls are optimizations of surface area and their center[S] are orientation devices. The prescribed fantasies of Ira Zepp seem to be misplaced by the unsymmetrical growth of Smithhaven Mall.