Strip Malls and Shopping Centers

In the 1910s, Chicago architect Arthur Aldis persuaded the developers of Lake Forest, Illinois to include a Market Square designed explicitly to accommodate motor vehicles. This plan of configuring commercial buildings around off-street parking became ubiquitous. An evolution of the store block concept, both strip malls and shopping centers face the store fronts onto the parking lots, in a linear format in the case of strip malls, and in a larger polygon of stores surrounding the parking in the case of shopping centers.