The Pattern Language of Retail Architecture

[elfs]

Christopher Alexander's famous book, A Pattern Language, is an analysis and distillation of architecture throughout history, looking for the recurring, natural, and organic patterns of construction in housing and communal layouts that emerge from human activity. People like thick walls that imply the building is held up, sunny counters, waist-high shelves, built-in seating. People like having a tree in the front yard; it lets their monkey brains know there's a place to run if a lion shows up. Alexander's book has a touchy-feely, new-agey approach sometimes, but his basic merging of architecture and psychology is brilliantly spot-on.

It occurs to me that, somewhere in the world, there is an anti-Alexander who has studied the Gruen transfer, "that split second when the mall's intentionally confusing layout makes our eyes glaze and our jaws slacken. The moment when we forget what we came for and become impulse buyers," and pushed it to extremes. A Pattern Language for Retail is probably one of those evil books you can only get from obscure sources, because it describes the ways in which color, layout, and blaring music can be used to disorient the shopper, make him anxious, and tell him that the only way to alleviate the anxiety is to buy something.

Comments

[polydad.livejournal.com]

Those of us who respond to anxiety by leaving the building are presumably not the target audience of said book?

Sounds like someone is agoraphobic

[ideaphile.livejournal.com]

(Sorry for the pun, but it was irresistable.)

Seriously, do you think any shopping mall has a confusing layout?

They may be deliberately designed to dazzle, but any confusion comes from the minds of visitors who allow the colors, textures, and sounds to drive out the short-term memory of where they parked their cars.

And as polydad observed, the natural response to anxiety is not "to buy something," it's to go somewhere else that doesn't provoke anxiety. Up a tree, maybe, as you said yourself just a few lines earlier. In a mall, the urge to buy comes primarily from the need to fit in with other shoppers, the drive to achieve, and the desire to own attractive things, not from anxiety.

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...by pure coincidence, writing this in Bellevue Square

Re: Sounds like someone is agoraphobic

[resonant.livejournal.com]

I actually read a book on shopping mall designs back in university, and it explicitly said that exits were to be made discrete and exterior views were to be avoided - just as with casinos, the goal was to create a "lobster trap" design, where people would wander about looking for the exit, hopefully to be diverted before they found it, with no outside scenery to remind one of the passing of time.

Re: Sounds like someone is agoraphobic

[ideaphile.livejournal.com]

That sounds like someone's idea of basic advice for many kinds of retail spaces, and it's a long way from this "Gruen transfer" thing, which is ridiculous on the face of it for the reasons I gave.

Anyway, Gruen doesn't seem to have designed any malls of the type he's criticized for. His malls were modeled on European shopping districts, but enclosed because they were built in northern cities-- Minneapolis, Chicago, and Pittsburgh, for example. From the pictures I've been able to find, they're very clean, sensible, and as open as possible under the circumstances.

The criticism now seems to me to be little more than whiny BS from people who bear some irrational grudge against materialism and have demonized Gruen just because his work has facilitated it.

I'll also note that some of the most successful new malls in recent years have open-air layouts-- hardly the sort of shift we'd be seeing if the "Gruen transfer" was a real phenomenon.

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