Jonathan Glancey
BBC - 11 April 2014
Shopping malls are not meant to be sinister. And, yet, in 1977,
George A Romero chose to film sequences of Dawn of the Dead, his cult
horror zombie movie, in a deserted mall. Shorn of life and light, the
great echoing chambers of the enclosed shopping centre took on a very
eerie tone indeed. Curiously, Romero’s set design has much in common
with photographs of the ever-increasing number of abandoned malls strewn
across the United States from California to New England. There are well
over a hundred of these lifeless concrete and steel behemoths sprawled
beside freeways on the fringes of far-flung American suburbs.
Economic
decline in certain areas − notably the mid-West − combined with an
accelerating trend towards online shopping and new forms of urban
shopping centres have pushed the once seemingly invincible and
all-American shopping mall into decline. Many are thriving, and being
renovated and extended, yet ‘ghost malls’ are fast becoming the ‘ghost
towns’ of the early 21st Century, and photographers have begun to see
them as fascinating, if decidedly disturbing ruins.
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