Re-Inventing the Mall

"Now, the humble shopping mall is no longer an automatic stand-in for architectural compromise and mere eco­nomic necessity. Architects-successful ones, famous ones-suddenly want to do malls. Just this month there are two new examples. On Octo­ber 8, the Westside Shopping and Leisure Center, in Bern, Switzerland, opens its doors. This design is by Daniel Libeskind, fresh off major museum projects in Denver, Toronto, and San Francisco. And, at the end of the month, the 1.6-million-square-foot Westfield London will open in Shepherd's Bush, with a luxury-retail outpost-a sort of appendage mall-by Michael Gabellini, the New York architect best known for his sleek, minimalist interiors for fashion houses like Jil Sander and Giorgio Armani."

"The idea of creating an urban space inside the shopping mall seems to be de rigueur these days. But what is striking about these projects is how backward-looking they are; the 19th-century arcade is, apparently, the preferred model for the 21st-century mall."