Electra Lang

Electra Lang

What’s fascinating about the Prudential Center and Copley Square malls is the way in which they both seek to simultaneously evoke the covered shopping street and, more complicatedly, the dynamics of a small market town. In the first case, the peaked glass roofs call to mind an arcade, a feeling added to by the occasional kiosks placed in the path. These particular malls are not merely a collection of little shopping streets, but a collection organized around central town square-like open places. I chose to focus my sketch on one of these places, which is not merely shapes as a town square with four main ways leading to and away from it, but contains a fountain (albeit a quite modern one), plant-life, plenty of natural light from a huge glass ceiling several stories up, and benches to sit on. The fountain is even filled with pennies, just as one in a town square might be. The storefronts, too, add to the illusion of being outside as they all are designed differently, as if they were actually separate buildings on a street (Williams Sonoma is actually designed to look like an old-fashioned shop front). The malls are arranged as a series of these “squares,” linked together by generally straight and not-too-long walkways. In the Copley Square Mall, these are lined in a pink marbleish material and their main part is of herringbone pattern brick, again recalling an outdoor street (perhaps of an older market town). These pathways are almost entirely devoid of places to sit or pause (this is truer of the Copley Mall than the Prudential Center) and instead function to keep people moving—moving towards more stores or towards the squares, where there are places to sit. I rarely saw anyone pause for long in these walkways, nor did anyone deviate from the general traffic plan of walking on the right side. All walking looked purposeful and barely anyone was there alone.

Newbury Street, unlike the malls, does not have a captive audience to work with and so the signage on the street is adapted accordingly. Whereas in the malls, the names of stores simply appear above their doorways, on Newbury St almost every shopkeeper has devised some sort of sign for his establishment which will present itself directly to the eye of the pedestrian—whether a sandwich board on the sidewalk or a sign protruding perpendicularly from above the doorway. Whereas everyone in a mall is almost certainly there to shop, this is not necessarily the case on Newbury St as it is also simply a street, and so shopkeepers must do what they can to attract not only the shopper, but the random passerby. In order to further accommodate shoppers, Newbury St has been made particularly convenient for pedestrians, who control the traffic at most intersections as a result of the one-way traffic and stop signs. Making it more mall-like, there is not only parking on every available inch of the street, but the commercial section of the street is flanked by parking lots, making the street more conducive to the all- day shopping expeditions more usually associated with the shopping mall.