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Austrian architect Victor Gruen imagined the shopping mall as a shared retail utopia: a centralized location for advanced capitalism to function at its highest efficiency. Between 2019 and 2022, an estimated 25% of all shopping malls will close their doors, leaving what architectural theorist Rem Koolhaas called deactivated ‘junkspace’. Ghost Spaces serves to present and archive these modern ruins through vibrant, detailed large format photographs of the spaces which defined the capitalistic ideal of the late 20th century. The collection of images from across America are an inquest into the function shopping malls: their decline serving as evidence of a changing consumer.
Austrian architect Victor Gruen imagined the shopping mall as a shared retail utopia: a centralized location for advanced capitalism to function at its highest efficiency. Between 2019 and 2022, an estimated 25% of all shopping malls will close their doors, leaving what architectural theorist Rem Koolhaas called deactivated ‘junkspace’. Ghost Spaces serves to present and archive these modern ruins through vibrant, detailed large format photographs of the spaces which defined the capitalistic ideal of the late 20th century. The collection of images from across America are an inquest into the function shopping malls: their decline serving as evidence of a changing consumer.