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the psychology and history of retail, and understanding how properly designed stores can break down threshold resistance, gave us a competitive advantage. The real innovation we brought was the design of the malls.

FOUR
Evolution of the Arcade
    I t’s common for people to view the types of malls I started building in the 1960s—gigantic, air-conditioned, enclosed environments—as twentieth-century American inventions. But malls are neither contemporary nor American. And while it may have seemed that I was embarking on a risky gamble, I was in fact walking in the footsteps of generations of retail pioneers.
    Now, that might sound strange coming from me. Along with Victor Gruen, the Viennese architect who designed much-studied retail projects in Detroit and Minneapolis in the 1950s, I am often listed among the early creators of this “new” retail archetype. As Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point, wrote in the New Yorker, “If Victor Gruen invented the mall, Alfred Taubman perfected it.”
    High praise from one of the most successful business writers of our time. But I’m going to have to decline it. Unlike Gruen, a colorful man who embraced this questionable honor with gusto, I have never been comfortable with the accolades and blame that come with being known as one of the guys who “malled” America.
    Truth is, major enclosed marketplaces with the depth of merchandise selection to pull customers from considerable distances—otherwise known as malls—have been around for centuries.
    I keep in my office a beautiful book of architectural drawings, Monuments modernes de la Perse, published by Pascal Coste, a French architect who studied the cities of Persia in the 1800s. It contains an illustration of a fabric bazaar in Isfahan. The shops, in this case selling spaces leased to fabric merchants, are arranged around a dramatic domed grand court with a fountain at its center. Merchandised corridors branch out from the grand court. Daylight streams in through the skylights above. Sketch in a Starbucks and you’d think you were looking at Woodfield mall.
    Or consider this account written by a European traveler in 1784 describing the bazaars of Istanbul:
    Superb buildings, filled with beautiful covered passageways, most of which rest on pillars. They are all well maintained. Each business has its own hall, where the merchandise is presented…visitors come for entertainment as well as business.
    This building type was refined in Europe, beginning almost immediately after the French Revolution, as democratic upheaval helped spawn a middle class in France eager to take on the material trappings of the upper crust. Fine apparel, home furnishings, great food, and festive entertainment were available in the arcades, of which the Galeries de Bois of the Palais Royal was perhaps the finest early example:
    One can divide the arcade into two broad categories: open arcades and covered arcades; the later being an improved version of the former.
    It was not enough to save the pedestrian from the distress and anxiety of the street: one had to attract him positively to the arcade so that once he entered he would feel himself caught up by its magic and forget everything else. It all depended on the ability to build anarcade bright as an open space…warm in winter, and cool in summer, always dry and never dusty or dirty.
    That sounds a lot like one of the Taubman Company’s early leasing brochures. (By the way, experience has taught me that the quality of a real estate development is usually in inverse relation to the cost and hyperbole of its brochure!) And if your travels ever take you to Milan, make a point of visiting Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, the quintessential mall. Opened in the 1800s, this Italian masterpiece incorporates most of the essential elements of great shopping center design on a grand scale. The mall corridors, which intersect at a domed grand court, serve