ABSTRACT
At the recommendation of well-meaning friends, I went to a place called Wrentham Village outside of Boston, a development that had a particularly architectural appeal, recalling the name of the eighteenth-century architect, Sir Christopher Wren. But Wrentham Village would have baffled Wren. The village had some features that he would have understood well: nicely scaled pedestrian streets, Tuscan-columned colonnades, publicly accessible squares, and the occasional signpost to help people get their bearings. But those traditional forms had a peculiar function. Instead of the mix of uses we might expect in a village, there stood row after row of outlet stores for national 136franchises, most of them offering clothing and accessories or domestic goods. Although many people walking around that hot summer day had rather less covering than Wren would have been used to, the skimpiness of their clothing stood in sharp contrast to the sheer quantity of apparel in those stores, whose windows had large signs touting their deeply discounted prices. Indeed, with everything on sale, it wasn’t price that set one store off from another, so much as design - from the design of the clothing in the windows to the design of the store interior to the design of the logo and ‘look’ of each brand.
