Los Angeles - Shopping Mall

Los Angeles has 86 languages spoken in the schools, 13 major ethnic groups, and 140 incorporated cities across the county. Then, Charles Jencks expresses Angelenos as "heterophiliacs" to explain how much Los Angeles symbolises American postmodern city. Los Angeles is a part of a broader and more complex global restructuring of urban cities and metropolitan life.

Many scholars note that Los Angeles has a possibility to be utopia more than other adjacent cities. The existence of shopping malls can be one of remarkable examples of Los Angeles’ utopia. The image above is Beverly Center Mall which is located at the edge of Beverly Hills in Los Angeles. This mall contains 160 boutiques and restaurants and 13 film theatres, and the Rooftop Terrace showcases panoramic views stretching from downtown Los Angeles to the famous Hollywood sign. Beverly Center provides its customers hyperreal vastness of artificial wonder and disneyfied sublimity, therefore it can become themed space which is separated from real outside. At the same time, this separation from outside makes a kind of another world in Los Angeles. This phenomenon links to the erasure of space because the interior is the place of postmodernist perfection where technology allows us to exist in an atmosphere of purified air, perfect temperature, and steel and glass armour plating. Contrary to the separation from real world, the structure of architecture is the seamless flows of space in such shopping malls or domestic interiors. This loss of experience of real world prompts people to gain information of the rest space of Los Angeles through TV or other mediums. Therefore, shopping malls like Beverly Center expand interiorisation.