Volume 41, Number 13 · July 14, 1994
Mysteries of the Mall
By Witold Rybczynski
A Sense of Place, a Sense of Time
by John Brinckerhoff Jackson
Yale University Press, 212 pp., $22.50
Most of us don't attach much importance to the mundane architectural settings of our everyday lives. We go in and out of supermarkets, fast-food restaurants, and gas stations without a second thought, perhaps because we understand these places so well that they seem merely a part of our natural surroundings. It's necessary to think back to childhood to recall what it was like when such ordinary places were new and strange. Iremember my first schoolroom, with its imposing hierarchy of many little desks and one big, important desk. Or the first time I was taken to a museum, with its succession of large, silent rooms filled with labeled glass cases. Or the first, truly strange experience of a movie theater:sitting alone, in a crowd, in the dark. As children, we explore these unknown, exotic places like anthropologists in a new world, without the encumbrance of foreknowledge; we are obliged to decipher for ourselves the meanings of the new place, and to find our own place in it.
Review, 4054 words
To read the full text of this piece, please choose one of the following options:
|
If you are already a subscriber to the Review's electronic edition, please sign in: |
To subscribe to the electronic edition, please press the button below. |
To purchase access to this article for $3, please press the button below. |