👀 Malls. Really.

#32 | An ode to consumption

If a shopping mall exists in the metaverse, is it a shopping mall or a Meta Mall? I never thought I’d begin this post with a Meta reference, but here we are. I’ve always thought of malls as soulless, glamorous, better-lit avatars of expo centres. No? Just me then.

The shopping mall may seem like a modern artefact – widely regarded as the legacy of a stranded architect/city planner called Victor Gruen and a cancelled flight. But was he really the first?

Apollodorus of Damascus, an engineer from Roman Syria and Emperor Trajan’s favourite builder, built the Trajan market, likely the world’s first enclosed shopping mall! Apollodorus died not from credit envy but from being punished to death for dissing Emperor Hadrian, who by the way, was not emperor when the dissing happened.

Aamer