Alexandra Lange > Quotes

“When I emailed an archive for a picture of what was arguably America’s first shopping center, the librarian wrote back with the needed links and added, “As a child of the 1990s, I’ve got many a fond memory of the mall, including the fad kiosks (pogs, especially).”
― Alexandra Lange, Meet Me by the Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall

“People often tell me that they get lost in malls. Malls are a habitat. Some of us are natives. If you grew up hiking, you know to look for blazes. If you grew up with malls, you know to look for the anchor stores, the fountain, the food court. Orient yourself to those cardinal points before you set out.”
― Alexandra Lange, Meet Me by the Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall

“These early successes were a boon to developers, who could now confidently double their shopping area and add the final technological breakthrough that made a mall a mall: air-conditioning.”
― Alexandra Lange, Meet Me by the Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall

“The act of making that designers find so satisfying is built into early childhood education, but as they grow, many children lose opportunities to create their own environment, bounded by a text-centric view of education and concerns for safety. Despite adults’ desire to create a safer, softer child-centric world, something got lost in translation. Jane Jacobs said, of the child in the designed-for-childhood environment: “Their homes and playgrounds, so orderly looking, so buffered from the muddled, messy intrusions of the great world, may accidentally be ideally planned for children to concentrate on television, but for too little else their hungry brains require.”9 Our built environment is making kids less healthy, less independent, and less imaginative. What those hungry brains require is freedom. Treating children as citizens, rather than as consumers, can break that pattern, creating a shared spatial economy centered on public education, recreation, and transportation safe and open for all.”
― Alexandra Lange, The Design of Childhood: How the Material World Shapes Independent Kids