Environmental & Architectural
Phenomenology Newsletter
Insidious Design: The Silent Salesman and the American Shopping Mall
Kascha Semon
Semon is currently a doctoral student in philosophy at Boston College. She completed her master’s in Philosophy at Stony Brook University where, under the direction of Edward Casey, she wrote a thesis examining the influence of Heidegger's Being and Time on architectural theory. semonk@bc.edu. © 2006 Kascha Semon.
Recent architectural theorists consider the American shopping mall as part of a vernacular landscape that evolved as product of large social movements and nonprofessional buildings that can be read for “popular social meanings and uses from the stylistics of the built environment” (Dyer 2003, p. 263).
The American shopping mall, however, did evolve from a structure originally designed by an architect, not from a vernacular culture. In addition, while all of the mutations and variations in the 50 or 60 years of mall architectural history may not have been produced by definitive acts of design, quite a number of these variations were carefully instituted.
The subtle implementation of design elements such as the “Silent Salesman” and their equally subtle effects on consumers provide an excellent case study for examining how the built environment quietly conditions behavior.
Cherry Hill Mall: A Case Study
Stephanie Dyer (2003) has analyzed the development of New Jersey’s Cherry Hill Mall. Her research places this mall’s design in relation to vernacular/folk architecture and to urban/suburban planning. The study explains that “instead of the product of the folk, such areas are the contested product of many actors–architects, real estate developers, retailers and tenants” and that the meaning of such spaces are not fixed at the moment of their physical creation, but are continually renegotiated” (ibid., p. 263). In fact, “many shopping centers of the postwar period were created by well-respected architects who also worked on more esteemed forms of commercial building” (ibid., p. 264).
Built in 1961, Cherry Hill Mall is a good study model because its “design and management pedigree preclude it from being considered vernacular in origin” (ibid., p. 264). Cherry Hill’s designer, Victor Gruen, researched the social problems accumulating in post-war American suburbia; he presented his mall design as a palliative to the new American malaise. Gruen believed his mall would:
create additional attractions for shoppers by meeting other needs [i.e. other than simply consumption] which are inherent in the psychological climate peculiar to suburbia. By affording opportunities for social life and creation in a protected pedestrian environment, by incorporating civic and educational facilities, shopping centers can fill an existing void. They can provide the needed place and opportunity for participation in modern community life that the ancient Greek Agora, the Medieval Market Place, and our own Town Squares provided in the past (Gruen & Smith 1965, pp. 29-30).
As is evident from Gruen’s comments, Cherry Hill’s structure arose not from mere unprofessional, vernacular coincidences but through an intentional design process. Cherry Hill, as the first enclosed regional mall in the northeastern United States, served as a template for many other malls across the country. While other subsequent malls may have been constructed by developers based on pre-existing plans, they derived from a carefully and professionally designed complex.
Gruen, in fact, invented the “peculiar introverted architectural design that became the basis for the classic regional shopping center” (Dyer 2003, p. 264). The introverted design would allow suburbia to “overcome the ‘vulgarity; of sprawling highway strips’” (ibid., p. 265).
At the time, its New Jersey community welcomed Cherry Hill as a necessary supplement to the rapidly developing suburbia. Gruen and the mall’s manager, like others responsible for malls around the country, honestly believed that the particular configuration of this work of architecture would enact social change. While Gruen cannot be blamed for failing to foresee the entire devolution of suburbia, one can now see how such un-integrated and enclosed design inherently distances itself from the problems mounting in the surrounding area rather than solving these problems.
The Silent Salesman
Gruen’s ideology and the needs of the Cherry Hill community help to clarify the initial impetus in the construction of the mall, but other designers and communities refined the mall’s particular configuration. After the initial round of mall construction after World War II, designers gradually permutated and refined mall design to meet the changing needs of consumers and retailers. Consumers were learning to shop at the mall, an activity different from previous methods of shopping and demanding subtle change in the physical environment.
Increasingly, elevators and staircases grew in size and stature to become “the celebratory centerpieces for the design statement” (Israel 1994, p. 56). Such spaces “were deemed essential, even if they subtracted from profitable selling areas for impulse merchandise at 100 percent traffic locations on several floors” (ibid., p. 56).
The escalator-atrium configuration became the iconographic and circulatory center of the mall, controlling the movement of shoppers throughout the complex. Designers and management decided whether customers should “have the convenience of riding up or down continuously to their vertical destination” or whether they should “be forced to walk around” (ibid., p. 121). Designers and mall owners understood that the configuration of the building was easily exploited to manipulate the consuming habits of the shoppers.
One refinement was the “Silent Salesman,” an element of interior design within the building. Under pressure to reduce the number of actual salespeople in stores, retail stores developed set-ups designed to help people shop effectively on their own:
The self-selection fixture, the gondola, was called “silent salesman.” It was designed to make the shopping experience and final sales transaction more comfortable, faster and more efficient. The entire nation gradually became accustomed to shopping and purchasing as an individual action without the pampering and pressured cajoling of salespeople” (ibid., p. 20).
This marvelous invention is simply the now-familiar sales rack which includes a model wearing the promoted set of clothing framed by a series of shelves with a variety of options. The shopper looks at the model who suggests, perhaps, a particular shirt, pant and belt combination; he then peruses the surrounding racks for the color and size he wants.
Via the Silent Salesman, designers replaced actual people with the built environment. Such mechanization is a familiar trope in industrialization: what was once accomplished by several people is now accomplished by a single technological object. This construction now seems so obvious as to be contiguous with the act of shopping, but it in fact represents a trend toward individualization of the shopping experience. Rather than being attended by numerous employees who suggest to one what one ought to buy this month, the building itself guides the shopping process. The mall itself tells one what one ought to buy.
What “one ought to do ”is indicated not by the behavior of human assistants but via the built environment. The Silent Salesman conditions the behavior of the visitor while under the guise of “mere architecture.” Certainly, such conditioning is not unique to the design elements identified above or to the mall in general. In fact, the pervasiveness of such conditioning is its most striking feature.
Excavating Design Elements
While many thinkers in various disciplines harp on the intertwinement of technology and behavior, philosophers rarely extend their analysis to the level of architecture. Architecture, by virtue of its association with the arts (in which affecting behavior and experience is expected) or by its association with daily life and the vernacular (in which it is roughly assumed that form follows function), escapes such criticism.
Yet increasingly, architects employ more advanced technologies from built-in plasma screens to glass of changing opacity to refine their control over the range of experience of the user. In a consumer environment in particular, critics and philosophers should excavate such buried design elements to assess their effects. This is not to say that these elements are “bad” any more than that technology is “bad” but simply that the critic should recall them for evaluation.
References
Dyer, Stephanie, 2003. Designing “Community” in the Cherry Hill Mall. Constructing Image, Identity, & Place: Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture. A. Hoagland & K. Briesch, eds. Knoxville: Univ. of Tenn. Press.
Gruen, Victor & Smith, Larry, 1960. Shopping Town USA. NY: Rheinhold.
Israel, Lawrence J., 1994. Store Planning/Design: History ,Theory, Practice. NY: Wiley.