POSTMODERN NIGHTMARE

I have seen the postmodern nightmare in all of its hyperornamentation and disjointed juxtaposition. It is called the Westfield Shopping Center, formerly known as the Southcenter Mall. Three levels of floors are joined by columns and escalators and support beams and cables. Cutouts allow one to peer between levels, but each cutout is shaped differently from the others. Most are oddly shaped quadrilaterals. A couple look like distorted outlines of the state of Utah.

The food court has been decentralized and scattered on the second floor in open kiosks. Asian themed restaurant kiosks are somewhat gathered around a section of seating that has plants native to Asia and strange bamboo poles jutting this way and that out of the planter boxes. The rest seem to have no rhyme or reason for their location.

The hallways and main walkways are likewise askew. They widen and narrow with abandon. Sections of wall intrude into pathways, where the occasional pedestrian consumer is captured as though in the eddy of a river—flailing about, waiting for the swell of the crowd to pass or for an opening to appear.

It almost appears as if the new mall structure was dropped from above by some giant creature onto the old mall. And, that would make sense, except that the new sections of this shopping center have been purposefully jumbled. There are at least four different tile patterns on the floors, that run into one another at odd angles and curves, which would be fine except that the tile patterns don't work together. Light orange and green polished marble squares collide with rough hewn burgundy and gray granite rectangles.

It is just an unseemly architectural mess that is attempting to be hip and cool and new. Ultimately, however, it is overwhelming and fatiguing.


The worst piece, for me, though, has to be the Borders bookstore on the second floor. It was my first experience of what Borders is touting as one of their "concept" or "boutique" stores. It is a similar mess.

The store is difficult to navigate and feels cluttered. Aisles in a section run one direction and then aisles in a nearby section run in another direction. The fiction section runs alphabetically from right to left, which is counterintuitive and backwards, especially since each section of shelving runs correctly from left to right. It was therefore difficult to search for particular authors because I had to keep correcting where I thought I was going.

It is not only the floor that is cluttered. Clumps of signs hang together, ostensibly over the sections below them. But with the confused geography of the floor and the conjoined imagery and blended words of the signage it is a miracle that anyone can arrive at their destination.

And, like the fluctuating width of the walkways of the mall, there were many occasions during my short visit to the bookstore that I had to wait for others to pass so that I could continue to where I thought I needed to go, or vice versa. This was simply due to the fact that the natural flow of where people/consumers would go was sliced and diced and redirected, presumably in an attempt to drive us past items that we originally did not want to purchase, but do now, simply because we passed their glitter and glitz unwantingly thrust into our faces.

It also used to be that you could hop onto almost any computer terminal in the store and search for a particular book and author. With the "concept" or "boutique" Borders, that is finished. I went to one terminal to find that I could only search for audiobooks that I wished to download. Another was dedicated to music. I finally gave up and left.

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"For the first time in history, with the establishment of department stores, consumers begin to consider themselves a mass. (Earlier it was only scarcity which taught them that.) Hence, the circus-like and theatrical element of commerce is quite extraordinarily heightened."
—page 43 [A4, 1], The Arcades Project by Walter Benjamin