Martin Krieger's Remarks
I teach an undergraduate upper-division course, "Design of the Good,' about how value is embedded in designed things, programs, places, and institutions. The original impulse came from my reading Kant's Critique of Judgment (1790), in which it is argued that the aesthetic and the ethical have a similar logical or formal structure, although there is no applicable law (such as the golden rule) to aesthetic judgments. Aesthetic judgments are judgments of taste, neither immediate nor lawlike, but judgments where we demand of others that they agree with our judgments--even though they often disagree with us, and demand that we agree with them. As we go along in our discussion, we learn to point out features of the work which ought to allow someone else to see with their own eyes why a work is the way we claim it is.
So a second impulse comes out of criticism of works of art or literature, where particular details as well as architectonic and formal analysis are employed to point out what is going on in a work, its meanings, and the quality it may possess. In fact, such particulars and structures are never sufficient to decide if a work is of particularly high quality, because it is possible to confect a work that fulfills all the given details and structures, yet which is manifestly awful.
A third impulse comes from more general considerations of the nature of design, in particular the Argument from Design for the existence of God. The world is manifestly orderly, such order could not have happened by chance, and hence there must have been a Supreme Architect, or so it has been argued. Hume pointed out that the world could have been made by a group of craftsmen, who botched and bungled it until they got it to work at all.
When we went around the room in my class last year, each student indicating what they might study for its design, meaning, and quality, Mitchell Glaser mentioned "shopping centers." He was deadly serious, and as he testifies, he has been fascinated by shopping centers, and shopping malls in particular, since he was a toddler. We talked a bit more, and almost as a lark I suggested that he visit all the malls of Southern California. He took up the challenge, and this exhibition is the product of his traveling to all the "missions" of the late twentieth century.
What we hope to do in teaching is to convert our students' interests, fascinations, and obsessions into understanding and critical insight. In what way has this place been designed, what values are embedded in the design, and how might it be otherwise? What is wonderful here is to have all the malls in one place, to see them as expressions of commerce and fantasy.
I want to thank Susan Kamei of the Urban Land Institute, Los Angeles Chapter, and John Konarski of the International Council of Shopping Centers Educational Foundation, for their enthusiasm and support, as well as Tridib Banerjee and Robert Biller of our School.Martin H. Krieger
Professor of Planning
School of Policy, Planning, and Development
University of Southern California