![]() ![]() The scene begins with Cher and Christian (Justin Walker, in the Frank Churchill role) riding up the escalators, the symmetry of their bodies reflecting that of the mall rising around them. Westfield Fashion Square is a long, narrow, three-story mall, topped with a glass barrel vault and featuring indoor palms. Where Austen’s heroine encounters strangers on the high street and in millinery shops, Heckerling’s frequents Westfield Fashion Square and Contempo Casuals. ![]() In Clueless, director Amy Heckerling’s 1995 update of Jane Austen’s Emma, heroine Cher Horowitz (Alicia Silverstone) shares the self-delusion and queen-bee fashion sense of her 19th-century counterpart. The importance of the mall’s central atrium to teen life is reflected in the way teens occupy malls on film. The atrium was the center of the social life of the Roman domus and so, too, has it been the center of mall sociability.Ī friend who works with Bronx teens told me that his students like to take the subway to Bryant Park in Manhattan: That open green space, surrounded by national brand-name stores, with coffee kiosks on the corners and a carousel, serves as their stand-in for a suburban mall. In the shopping mall, the atrium serves a similar function, opening up the middle of a building lined with windowless shops letting in light, water, and plants and furnished like a living room. These courts often had an impluvium, or fountain, to catch rainwater from the roof, as well as furnishings for outdoor entertaining. Hence the atrium, which has its own storied architectural history: Ancient Roman houses were centered on open-air or skylit spaces, which provided daylight and breezes to the rooms surrounding them. But by the early 1970s, and the advent of more complexly laid-out malls in T-, X-, or O-shapes, patrons might wander forever, missing each other in the long, low-ceilinged identical halls. The earliest indoor shopping malls, with their I-shaped, bowling-alley forms, had no centralized place where groups could gather, nor much need for one. Is my friend hanging out at the mall? Is my crush? This is the atrium, the most important interior space of the mall for the adolescent both architecturally and psychologically. Escalators traveling between floors make for easy, surreptitious people-watching. If the mall is multilevel, skylights illuminate the space from above. A stepped, centralized seating area appears, in one form or another, in most malls built in the 1980s.
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