Strip Mall, Tract Home: Suicide
"Do you want to know what depresses the American spirit? Do you want to know why it feels as if the center cannot hold and the tyranny of mediocrity has been loosed upon our world? Do you want to know what instills thoughts of suicide and creates a desperate, low-level rage the source of which we cannot quite identify but that we know is right under our noses and that we now inhale Prozac and Xanax and Paxil by the truckload to attempt to mollify?
"I have your answer. Here it is. Look. It is the appalling spread of big- box strip malls, tract homes like a cancer, meta-developments paving over the American landscape, all creating a bizarre sense of copious loss, empty excess, heartless glut, forcing us to ask, once again, the Great All-American Question: How can we have so damned much but still feel as if we have almost nothing at all?" -quoted1
Admittedly architects are sensitive to the things that you and I would shrug at: an asymmetry, wasted space, unnecessary form, or overzealous function. However, although I dislike "strip malls" and would rather have a nice little downtown square in which to find things, there is logic behind the strip mall that you discover when it's gone.
Not more than once I've wished for a Borders/Target/Rubio/Coffee2 combination from Sioux Falls, where there are none.
1The actual story is from Mark Morford in the San Francisco Chronicle, but you'll find it at John Massengale's blog.
2Yeah, the price I'd pay for a good fish taco continues to escalate... I won't use the S word to avoid controversy.
9:27:06 PM 
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