Lange provides a smart and accessible cultural history — outlining the social, economic and architectural forces that led to the creation of U.S. malls as we know them. But she also looks forward.

[Lange] considers the all-too-familiar retail and 'lifestyle centers' to be 'ubiquitous and underexamined and potentially a little bit embarrassing as the object of serious study.' She then proceeds to examine them, thoroughly, seriously and in an engaging fashion.

... a well-researched introduction to the rise and fall and dicey future of an American institution.

... challenges the dominant narrative.

A question kept nagging me as I read Meet Me by the Fountain—one that Lange answers but not, I think, completely convincingly: Should malls be saved? She says yes, making the case that 'the mall is neither a joke nor a den of zombies, but a resource. America’s dead malls represent millions of square feet of matériel that are not going to be reabsorbed without investment and effort.' This is an important point: No one is served by hulking, decaying structures, least of all the people who live nearby, and Lange details some fascinating examples of adaptive reuse, including one former shopping center that’s been transformed into an Austin Community College campus.

Where the book fails to go is equally fascinating. As with the skyscraper, the mall is an architectural form pioneered by the US but arguably fully realised elsewhere. Lange takes us to Latin America and to the brilliant, desolate brutalism of Cumbernauld in Scotland, but not to Dubai, where the mall, with its ski slopes, has become the city centre..

The empty mall is the specter that haunts Lange’s book.

Lange turns a nostalgic but clear eye on the shopping mall as an icon of consumerism intimately linked with the American Dream.

Lange is attentive to the ways in which twentieth-century visions of the mall as a kind of town square were deliberately conceived to keep out people of color and of lower incomes. This reminder of how the smells, sights, sounds, and spatial layout of the nation’s malls are carefully controlled is an important counterpoint to the highly individualized experiences that animate them..

Lange pulls on an especially interesting thread: how malls and fine art often merged.

Thought-provoking.

Deeply researched.