The New Asian Mall

The 1956 opening of the Southdale Center in a Minneapolis suburb introduced a new architectural typology to the world. Replacing the neighbourhood shops of yesteryear, the mall offered consumers one-stop convenience and quickly proclaimed itself the future of retail. A decade later, Asia got its first mall with the opening of Ocean Terminal in Hong Kong, and the years that followed saw the proliferation and scale of malls across Asia far outstrip their western predecessors.

In 2001, Rem Koolhaas published ,inciting a theoretical examination of the place