ABOUT 10 years ago I found myself by accident, rather than design, in Salt Lake City. Since Salt Lake is the headquarters of the Mormon Church I thought it might be interesting to visit one of their temples. As luck would have it a new temple had just been constructed outside the city and guided tours were available to tourists before it was consecrated.

So I made the trip out to some far-flung suburb and queued with a lot of other curious tourists to view the place. Perhaps it was the word temple that made me expect something ornate and elaborate. In fact it looked just like an office block.

We were ushered into a basement locker room where we were presented with plastic pampootees for our feet. This was to stop us dragging dust into the place. Dressed in this rather sci-fi garb (I kept on thinking of nuclear plants) we were shown around.

The only recognisable signs that this was a church were the baptistry which was an octagonal room with a font in the centre, and the celestial room which was high and vaulted with mock Regency furniture upholstered in rose and pale green velour. Otherwise, it was a building with lifts, rubber plants and staticky carpet.

I was terribly disappointed. But then what was I expecting? The marble and gilt of a Catholic cathedral, perhaps.

Anyway, I was reminded of it when I visited the newly-opened Jervis Shopping Centre in Dublin, the latest in a string of shopping centres to open in cities and towns around Ireland. Except this time I was expecting the functional and got a little bit of the sacred.

I walked through the "impressive portal" on Mary Street, which the developers refer to as the Grand Arch and walked down the glacially-floored arcade leading to the central plaza (there's a shopping mall word if ever I heard it).

This central area, all in white, with tiered balconies and overhead rotunda with the fading winter light streaming through it was reminiscent of the cupola of a church. It encouraged you to look up, to be awed.

But to be awed by what? A monument to shopping?

In fact, at ground-level the Jervis Shopping Centre is more like an airport with those long chilly perspectives (the route to the toilets reminded me of nothing more than that endless tunnel to the Irish departure gates at Heathrow) and droves of rather dazed-looking people tramping to and fro.

Part of the lofty, institutional feel of the place is because until 1987 Jervis Street hospital occupied the site. Its services were then transferred to Beaumont Hospital. In a curious reversal of decentralisation there is a shopping mall now in its place which is, I suppose, what's unusual about the Jervis Street amenity. Mostly new shopping centres pop up on the outskirts in green-field sites, the most recent example being in Blanchardstown. In this case, the suburban has colonised the urban.

I'm sure when all the outlets are finally opened the place may lose this raw, functional air and will become a warm, welcoming consumer experience.

The developers need not worry. Crowds have flocked to each new shopping centre with the fervour of pilgrims to Mecca. Blanchardstown was snarled up for days when its new shopping mall was launched on the unsuspecting public. But what is it about them that excites such frenzy?

Well, their defenders will say, the shopping centre is very convenient. And so it is - all those stores under one roof. How innovative, how revolutionary. One-stop shopping.

But, in fact, the shopping centre is no more than a vertical extension of the high street; instead of having shops side by-side along the 19th-century linear model, they're simply stacked on top of one another. The inspiration for most shopping centres is the small town - the central meeting point (the market place) with streets leading off it. Rename those streets; call them walkways or arcades; rechristen the marketplace a plaza and Bob's your uncle you have a shopping centre.

Going further back, the shopping centre can be seen as a recreation of the medieval walled city; research in the US has found that the reason malls are so popular there is that people feel secure and protected in them.

The sense of enclosure and the constant surveillance of customers through security cameras makes women, in particular, feel safer. (Though the memory of the Jamie Bulger murder has eerie echoes; the child under video scrutiny at the "safe" shopping centre did not prevent him being abducted and killed.)

And that need for security has dictated design. American developers now install glass-sided lifts in their malls. Not for aesthetic reasons but because rape and/or sexual assault is less likely in a glass elevator.

I remember as a child in the late 1960s going (on a Sunday afternoon, interestingly) to visit Stillorgan Shopping Centre, which was the closest thing to a Lego impersonation of a small town, with its paved streets and linear design. We tramped around its little alleyways in the rain (it was not then under one roof), pressing our noses against the windows of the closed shops and being amazed that something so modern, so American, could be here in our city.

If sex was invented by the Late Late Show, then consumerism seems to have been conceived in the shopping centre. Oh for the small drapery shops and groceries of our childhood. (I have to admit a certain nostalgia for those quaint gadgets from the retailers of the 1950s - the little cash capsules that used to whizz around overhead in McBirneys, for example.)

The difference, of course, between the 1950s and now is that shopping has become a leisure pursuit in a way it wasn't then. Necessity drove people out to shop so it was a much more purposeful activity, a more business-like procedure all round.

Now with increasing secularisation it is the shopping mall that opens on a Sunday, at hours when most people in the 1950s would have been making holy the Sabbath day. So maybe the Jervis Centre's developers aren't far off the mark when they gave the building its minimalist, church-like grandeur.

IT is, I suppose, the deliberateness of these vast structures, their very artificiality which makes them often feel alien and disquieting. Urban development was in previous centuries organic and casual. Cities grew around ports and trading posts. Now shopping centres grow out of urban clearance or suburban development; there is nothing casual or organic about their conception. They are purpose-built edifices where the consumer is harassed by choice and physically made to feel small.

Even muzak, the once much-reviled pacifying music played in supermarket aisles and shopping centre lifts has become a musical category and has gained a cultish following. The multi-storey car park is almost a de rigeur scene in any modern detective film. Singles night at the supermarket endorses, if endorsement were necessary, the notion that shopping equals mating as a leisure activity.

In the next century when surely most of our shopping will be done via a terminal from home the shopping centre may well become the cathedral of its time. A place to be viewed as grandiose and lofty, impossibly old-fashioned and impractical and by then probably completely redundant.