Long before we carried the mall around in our pockets, we went there to see and be seen. From Fast Times at Ridgemont High to the teenage hordes of countless music videos, its escalators, food courts and fluorescent-lit corridors became shorthand for adolescence, aspiration and escape. Now the mall is getting the museum treatment.

When Powerhouse Parramatta opens on November 7, The Mall will be one of five inaugural exhibitions. Others range from The Turning, a major installation by British artist and stage designer Es Devlin, to The Dark, which draws on First Nations knowledge to explore darkness as a cultural and scientific realm. But The Mall turns its attention to a place whose familiarity has rendered its architecture almost invisible. Developed over two years by Powerhouse with Rotterdam-based OMA/AMO, the 24-month exhibition considers the mall as architecture, social experiment, economic engine and, increasingly, contested civic space.

At the centre of OMA’s contribution is managing partner David Gianotten, who led the exhibition’s curation, design and publication program with Gabriel Duarte and Sylvia Chan. If anyone is qualified to look past the food court and fluorescent lighting, it is OMA. Gianotten’s work has ranged from the Taipei Performing Arts Center and Potato Head Studios in Bali to WA Museum Boola Bardip and Singapore’s AIR Circular Campus; he was also a juror for the competition that selected Powerhouse Parramatta’s architects. More pertinently, 25 years ago, OMA and the Harvard Graduate School of Design published The Harvard Guide to Shopping, a mammoth study built around the proposition that shopping had become so embedded in urban life that you could no longer understand the city without understanding it.

The mall itself is a relatively recent invention. Austrian émigré Victor Gruen’s Southdale Center opened outside Minneapolis in 1956 as one of the first enclosed shopping centres, conceived less as a temple of commerce than a surrogate town square for suburbia. Gruen imagined a nucleus where shopping might coexist with culture and community, only to recoil from the car-dependent developments his idea spawned, dismissing them as “bastard developments”. Joan Didion, writing two decades later, was more ambivalent. She called malls “profound equalisers”, their regulated sameness capable of inducing what she memorably termed the “sedation of anxiety”.

That tension—between commercial machine and public living room—runs through the Powerhouse show. Gianotten is wary of treating the mall as a universal experience. In Western societies, he says, it has increasingly become about “meeting people, gathering, spending time”; elsewhere, from Indonesia to the Middle East, malls can function as refuges from climate, expressions of status or essential centres of daily life.

The mall’s history also has a surprisingly local chapter. Frank Lowy and John Saunders opened the first Westfield in Blacktown, Western Sydney, in 1959, helping develop the large-scale, transport-integrated retail model the company would eventually export worldwide. Westfield Parramatta, which opened in 1975 and was then Australia’s largest shopping centre, became a potent expression of an approach in which circulation itself was part of the seduction. Gianotten points to Westfield’s refinement of the “dumbbell” plan, designed to keep shoppers moving between anchor stores and, ideally, past everything in between.

OMA turns those tricks of circulation and seduction into the exhibition itself. Five structures—Desire, Arcade, Transaction, Ideal City and Forum—sit on a continuous floor modelled on a suburban car park, their geometries distilled from OMA/AMO’s study of 101 malls worldwide. “We’re trying to take these elements and create friction,” says Gianotten, making visitors conscious of mechanisms designed to operate almost subliminally.

Desire uses a fitting-room-like curtain and labyrinthine media wall to explore longing, beauty and status; Arcade reaches back to the shopping passages that preceded the mall; and Transaction exposes the financial and logistical machinery behind consumption. Ideal City brings Gruen into conversation with Archigram and the Japanese Metabolists, while Forum, a contemporary agora clad like an American big-box store, hosts screenings, talks and gatherings. The five become less a checklist of mall components than a kind of architectural autopsy: here is the body, and here are the systems that keep it humming.

The exhibition also extends onto the page through five “bookazines”, one for each theme. The first, Desire, deliberately borrows from the fashion magazine—the publishing form arguably most accomplished at manufacturing desire—then scrambles its codes. Long-form essays sit alongside punchier front-of-book material, while pages resembling fashion advertising contain curatorial content. “Powerhouse Publishing makes books, not catalogues,” says publications director Stephen Todd. The idea, he says, was to create “editorial slippage” between the two forms, allowing the publications to “extrapolate the curatorial ideas, rather than simply representing them”.

The contributor list bears that out. Peter Marino, whose retail architecture stretches from Dior’s Avenue Montaigne flagship to its boutique inside Westfield Bondi Junction, considers the physical construction of luxury; Loïc Prigent ranges from haute couture to streetwear; and British artist Linder Sterling, known for collages splicing consumer goods with sexualised bodies, created new work for the cover and gatefold. Arcade, Transaction, Ideal City and Forum will follow during the exhibition’s two-year run, with an ingenious OMA and Melbourne-based Studio Ongarato die-cut-and-Velcro system allowing each issue to bind to the next until the five become a single collector edition. As Todd points out, the books can also do something the exhibition cannot: travel far beyond Parramatta and remain in circulation after the show disappears.

It is an unusually expansive opening salvo for Powerhouse Parramatta itself. Designed by Moreau Kusunoki with Australian practice Genton, the 30,000-square-metre museum rises beside the Parramatta River as Western Sydney’s first state cultural institution, opening with five exhibitions and more than 3,000 objects.

There is an appealing symmetry here. A new museum staking out its own role as public space is opening with a show about another building type that has spent seven decades negotiating commerce, culture and community. Asked what he would change if designing a mall today, Gianotten is less interested in dismantling its familiar machinery than in restoring something malls have historically tried to erase: context.

“I would try to inject it instead of erasing it,” he says.

Seven decades after the mall set out to replace the town square, the argument has come full circle.

This story appears in the SPRING 2026 issue of Robb Report Australia & New Zealand. Click here to subscribe.

PHOTOGRAPHY: COURTESY POWERHOUSE PARRAMATTA/OMA.