It's a Mall World After All; In Harvard 'Guide to Shopping,' Some Real Finds
An 800-page compendium of charts, factoids, images and essays, it was produced by Harvard graduate students under the wing of Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas. The academics sought to document how shopping became the engine of 20th-century urban growth.</br></br>They contend shopping is now "the defining activity of public life." We shop at the airport, we shop at church. The train station is now a mall. McDonald's is also a toy store. Former military bases are being reconditioned as theme parks with shopping malls. We can buy embryos at the hospital. Museums make more money from their shops than from any other single source. And we are happy to treat ourselves to cultured gift wrap. Urbanization is commerce.</br></br>Few consumers would deny that their lives -- and the local landscape -- have been affected by mall sprawl, Big Box empires, entertainment zones and outlet villages. The real-life mystery is why so many serious architects didn't involve themselves at every step in their creation.</br></br>Koolhaas, of course, is the Pritzker Prize-winning creator of such high-profile design ventures as the Guggenheim Las Vegas and Prada's SoHo boutique. As an architect and thinker, he has long sought to meld high and low culture. The shopping project met that test: Koolhaas turned Harvard's elite into mall rats.</br></br>More than a dozen master's degree candidates fanned out over three continents to conduct field research, gather statistics and compile histories and anecdotal evidence. Their data, gathered during the 1997-1998 school year, have been reproduced on hefty stock and published by Taschen. The launch itself was an adventure in high-low culture: The guide was introduced in Europe with a tony event at London's Tate Modern. Last week New Yorkers were invited to a Chinatown restaurant.