I have always loved the Middle Ages. My favorite book to read is still Johan Huizinga’s The Waning of the Middle Ages. I mention it now because I wonder why Vicksburg hasn’t tried to build a more aesthetic and visually satisfying shopping space than we have.

We’re developing our waterfront and adding to the games and restaurants. But commercially, we stay plugged in to straight-line, enclosed, concrete malls that we build and abandon regularly.

Commercial space is now and has long been the driving impetus to beautiful design. We want people to buy things. True, in the Middle Ages, the impetus to grand construction was religious.

We built cathedrals to praise God and profess faith. And we’re still addicted to their beauty. We tour them and meander through them still. But medieval cathedrals have become our modern skyscrapers and bend toward selling things. That’s why we now have “renaissance” malls. Yet Vicksburg seems to stay resistant.

We have a WalMart mall built to the need for maximum utility, access to everything, and lots of parking space.

We had a declining, now mostly lost mall where fabled names have faded and are forgotten now.

We have a replacement mall mostly vacant where the parking lot fills up only one day of the year, on Christmas Eve.

We have an outlet mall furnished with the ins-and-outs of uncertain and un-lasting tastes and demands.

And we have tourists.  But where, among these, would they want to shop?

I do not favor re-building the Middle Ages — or the Renaissance — in our shopping malls. I prefer space not consumed by steeples or palaces or even gingerbread houses; nothing ornamented or ornate, but long, slender, sleek lines, a veritable “skin and bone” architecture; made up of “material honesty”; that is to say, the best use of the materials at hand, which are glass and steel. And lots of windows to see in-and-out-of.

The 19th century German-born master, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, transformed city landscapes in the 20th century, most notably Chicago and the famed Lake Shore Drive Apartments along Lake Michigan. But van der Rohe was famous for saying that “Less Is More” — meaning in the simplest form that the less clutter there is, the more encompassing the vision and effect. And that the creator of the space is more the one who passes by it than the one who builds. A unified, simplified architecture speaks more of harmony than most.

Mies van der Rohe’s architectural style will probably not ever suit the South. But the South should be open to options even as we remain attached to our history and customs.

I used to love shopping in Chicago at a mall called “Water Tower Place”, especially a bookstore there called “Rizzoli’s”. It appealed to both the modern and medieval in me. I didn’t have to choose. I don’t know if it’s still there. I wasn’t rich, but I wasn’t poor either. It worked for me.

We need shopping to be beautiful again.

Yolande Robbins is a community correspondent for The Vicksburg Post. You may email her at  yolanderobbins@fastmail.com