Transforming big box spaces into greener community centers.
While the mall was designed to showcase products intended for obsolescence, in the best-case scenario it is also a building designed to change. |
 | | Ege Soyuer |
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Many of the best-known architects in the United States designed malls. I. M. Pei designed Roosevelt Field on Long Island, Frank Gehry designed Santa Monica Place, Kevin Roche at Eero Saarinen & Associates designed the Neiman Marcus at NorthPark in Dallas. Cesar Pelli went from Saarinen's office to that of Victor Gruen, maestro of the mall, and continually used the lessons he learned there about light, air and escalators in urban projects like the Winter Garden in Lower Manhattan. So when people look quizzically at an architecture critic writing a book about malls, I could point them toward the list of Pritzker Architecture Prize winners. |
But that's not really why I wanted to write the book from which my guest essay for Times Opinion is adapted. Malls' popularity was more important to me than their pedigree. My previous book, "The Design of Childhood," was about the playrooms, classrooms and playgrounds that shape the lives of children, and began with a similar set of questions: What is the architecture that people use every day? And why don't we know more about it? |
In both cases, there was also a personal dimension. As a design critic and new mother I was fascinated (and sometimes horrified) by the baby items, like bouncy chairs and gendered toys, crawling into my home. As a child of the 1980s, I did my time at the malls of Durham, Raleigh and Chapel Hill, N.C., and as my own children grew from toddlers into tweens, I realized how little space we set aside in cities for adolescents to gather in safety, in public and without excessive surveillance. What was the playground for young adults? The mall. |
Finally, I could see the writing on the wall of the mall (sometimes literally, in the case of graffiti on abandoned properties). However high the quality of their architecture, and however many intense teenage memories were made there, the United States simply has too many underused malls. If these big boxes and parking lots were going out of style, what should they become? How could their next life repair some of the damage done by the car-centric suburbs that malls served? Could they be denser? Could they be greener? Could they offer more than shopping? The answer to all of these questions, I write in my essay, is yes. |
| READ ALEXANDRA'S FULL ESSAY HERE | | |
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