Future Now
The IFTF Blog
The Mall in America
In "Rethinking the Mall", former Dwell Editor-in-Chief Allison Arieff reports on her experience at the 2009 International Council on Shopping Centers, and a number of the ideas she brings up strike me as examples of exactly the type of thinking needed in order to confront some of the looming problems of retail in America.
Arieff recognizes that any potentially successful remedy for the current highly-disperse, car-reliant, big box retail environment must deal "with physical space but also with human behavior," and at the same time must strive to "strengthen the customer-retailer relationship." Basic ideas, yes, but surprisingly hard to incorporate in planning given the seemingly intractable symbiosis between destination retailers (e.g. Walmart, Costco) and automobile culture.
How, then, to approach the problem? Arieff identifies a few architectural firms that submitted promising proposals to the conference's Future Image Architectural Competition, but the one that caught my eye was the Wilson Yard proposal by Chicago based Fitzgerald Associates Architects. From Arieff:
"[The proposal] is not futuristic in the traditional sense — no biomorphic forms, moving sidewalks or shimmering touch screens. Instead, FAA recognizes that the future is already here and we’d better start building for it. The project dispenses with the notion of a freestanding mall and conceives instead of a walkable, mixed-use community. Key to their design is LEED silver certification, open space and multi-modal access (not just cars but rail, transit and pedestrian)."
A simple solution, yes, but also an example of the type of subtle-yet-radical shift in thinking that will be required on a large scale if any meaningful changes are going to be made to the American retail environment. Technological fixes are important, but technologies are as much social artifacts as they are physical objects, and any attempt at a solution to the problem of retail must necessarily address the social, biological, and political structures that uphold the current system.
Another proposal highlighted by Arieff, entitled FutuRetail 2020 by CommArts of Boulder, is interesting because of its wholesale re-envisioning of the mall. It is in this project that we can see the seeds of a strategy for moving towards a new future for our shopping experience:
"Malls will not only generate sales, they will 'grow food, create crafts, manufacture products, generate energy, and provide education.' As an antidote to time spent online, argue the CommArts folks, the mall becomes a social center, a 'spectacle of hands-on demos, lectures, performances, classes, tastings, parties, and shows.'"
The idea of creating a 'spectacle' of the mall's activities is striking given the long history of the spectacle as a driving engine of commercial development. Drawing from signals such as the current popularity of the DIY culture, and the general malaise of lives lived entirely online, CommArts has presented a vision of the future that would be worthwhile working towards.
Though I have not read any of Arieff's other work, her ideas have sent me running back to literature about History of Architecture and Social History so that I can learn more about this subject, and I look forward to pouring through her archives to read more of her ideas.