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Winners and Finalists

The competition produced many strategies, ideas and potential projects applicable to dead (and not-so-dead) malls worldwide. There is no single remedy or procedure to guarantee success in any location. Instead, the ideas generated by our entrants should be taken in combination with a variety of strategies and interchangeable between sites as conditions require. Prescriptions, when taken in combination, promise renewed life.

What follows are the winners and finalists selected over the course of two juries. In these ideas, we see not just salves, cures and adrenaline shots to bring dead malls back to life, but autopsies as well - compelling research about the malls and the symptoms that lead to their sickness and death. It is our belief that many potentially instructive ideas can be gleaned from the solutions or “cures” which follow.

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Statistical ProjectionHawthorne Mall, Hawthorne, CA

Central Office of ArchitectureEric Kahn, Ron Gobin, Russell N. Thomsonw/ Heather Flood, Sameena Sitabkhan, Gavin Farley

Surrendering to what the entrants describe as weak cultural symbols of “hyper-extremes, Moore’s law of computing power, the ubiquitous sound byte, plastic surgery, celebrity boxing, and Jeff Koons,” the entrants seek an architecture that can respond more nimbly to the demands of the retail / entertainment / culture industry. “We look towards the convention center (super-performer), a schedule driven indexical surface which samples the speed and diversity of cultural innovation.” “There is no progress in renovation, re-theming, or re-facading, there is only potential in re-thinking: [the mall should] rethink its relationship with the city.” By purposefully rejecting the traditional catchment typology, this mall “engineers an emergent model of ‘hyper-urbanism’.” “We imagine our mall more like Woodstock, an enthusiastic city of 150,000 people per 24 hour period - 54,000,000 people per year.” In an ongoing effort to simultaneously track and then fabricate culture, the entrants propose to create a terrain which engenders and continually adapts to the energy of capitalist flows - producing architectural strategies which imagine new public realms that erupt out of “culture(s) of productive friction(s).” Unlike strategies of themed place-making, this proposal offers an alternative, anticipatory model for the mall by re-thinking urbanism at a larger scale, recasting place-making and the idea of urban life in the form of a mall.

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generic mall mall area - excess = slim fit mallANCHORS AWAY! > In regional Centers, anchors create the critical mass necessary to support smaller tenants. these smaller tenants in turn, generate the major-ity of the mall’s income. In the Slim Fit Mall, the traditional notion of the anchor is dissolved. A new way of establishing the necessary critical mass is achieved by product-grouping

PANTS, PANTS, PANTS > If it’s just pants you wish to buy, then you can surround yourself with every two-legged option one could ask for: casual, used, formal, fitness, denim, leather, leopard, rubber, rubber-leopard, bermuda, low, tight, Tommy, loose, hip-huggers, Levis Ralph Lauren, one-off’s, studded, imports...etc. Accessories that relate to respective categories punctuate the sections, while complementary garments are adjacent to them. Optimal relationships evolve and are adjusted over time via purchasing feedback. ‘Way finding’ in the Slim Fit Mall is made easy. A ‘Sliding category scale’ orients you to the general area of choice. For merchandisers, the sections can be reasily increased / decreased to accommodate yearly, monthly, weekly, and even daily fluxuations of push and pull.

SHOP AND SWAP TILL YOU DROP > In the typical mall standard promotions accompany seasonal events: Valentines brings chocolate and pink things; Christmas brings decorations and carols over the loudspeakers. Our proposal neglects the typical retail promotions and instead seeks to emphasize, support and play a leading role in supplementing local events, gatherings and goings-on. Here, promotions are more intimate and personal celebrations of life within the local communities. Valentines brings a champagne brunch in an orchard. Christmas brings the community together to decorate The Valley’s biggest tree. October brings the welcome Cook-Out for the Mundialto Championships.

290,000SF INTO 11,600 5’x5’ MODULES > The organization of the Slim Fit Mall is between an expo/trade show and gallery. The entire 290,000sf of leasable mall area (excluding exterior stands) is broken down into 11,600 modules of 5’x5’ floor space. Each 25sf area includes air rights which can be bought, sold or traded. Retailers negotiate with mall leasing agents to secure space. Mall agents monitor changes, patterns and preference of their shoppers and retailers ensuring an opti-mum balance between supply demand pleasure and fulfillment.

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Slim Fit MallValley Plaza, North Hollywood, CA

Pierre DeAngelis & Carmen Suero

The entrants looked at the existing mall and imagined that the overall footprint could be greatly reduced by consolidating similar occurrences of merchandise while simultaneously eliminating redundancies in circulation, services, support spaces and display. The mall is stripped of its gross square footage while its gross leasable area is maximized: the Slim Fit Mall. The remaining site area is then reclaimed as a community park and merchant stands. The urban strategy deployed to achieve this is to alter the streetscape back to its original block module. While the adjacent east-west circulating streets would remain closed to automobile traffic, the north-south oriented streets would be brought all the way through the site again, making three long, pronounced linear strips: a linear mall, a linear aggregation of stands and a linear park. “The economic necessity for the area to have a fully functional regional shopping center while there is a scarcity of available land in The Valley suggests the typical remedy of a mega-entertainment-based retail development. However, such a development runs counter to the ambitions of the North Hollywood community, and grossly minimizes and homogenizes the potential of the site in an area where large swatches of land are so scarce. Mass must give way to intensity. The space gained on the site by compressing the mall area allows us to explore other opportunities for land use as well as programmatic opportunities that supplement the mall and community.” New methods of consolidation, signage and branding would be developed and the consolidation of cashiers allows shoppers to freely roam throughout the highly organized yet continuously programmed retail bar. The excess, formerly non-leasable areas of the mall, are all re-claimed in the park.

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Endogenous Healing Methods in the Treatment of Mall DecayDutchess Mall, Fishkill, NY

InterboroChristine Williams, Tobias Amborst, Daniel D’Oca, Georgeen Theodore

“No one has much hope for resuscitating Dutchess as a shopping center” - the town of Poughkeepsie to the north has become the de facto magnet for retail growth. “The NYC team of developers who own it freely admit they are ‘land-banking,’ holding the property until land values increase.” Accepting this, the entrants avoided the idea of a fixed master plan for redevelopment in favor of “a collection of small, cheap, feasible (and potentially lucrative) moves implemented over time that can lead to many possible futures.” While the bulk of programs would be community sponsored, the genesis of future development would be formed through several specific projects: the introduction of small-business office space around infrastructural “hot-box” cores, a day-care facility and the introduction of “quick-circuit” programs people are accustomed to elsewhere such as McDonald’s drive-throughs, car washes, banks, etc. Several “adrenaline shots” would be administered in the form of leisure/entertainment programming to give a burst of energy at night too. While many of these new programs would exist as quasi-temporary land leases meant to allow the developers to act on rising real estate values in years to come, the entrants hope that the assembled businesses over time will make an impact on the choice of future tenants and future programming. Whatever the project becomes - part residential community, part office park, or perhaps re-emerging as a shopping mall - the intention is to create a “heterotopia that combines elements of each program, along with hybrid cultures that would emerge from their juxtaposition” - a marriage of global or even regional commercial concerns with the everyday retail concerns of the immediately local.

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A Nu’burban MallEagle Rock Mall, Eagle Rock, CA

Elizabeth Meyer and Anne Rosenberg

Purposefully challenging mall renovation strategies set forth in New Urbanist theory, the “Nu’burban mall” looks back to the mall’s suburban origins for its revival. In suburbia, neighborhoods are rendered distinct from commercial districts. In “Nu’burbia” all shopping and activities required to support the community are dispersed throughout the circulation network allowing inhabitants to park in front of where they shop. The traditional, condensed, aggregated retail model of the mall that separates anchors, tenants, cars and parking is replaced by a suburban strategy of dispersal. Three systems of flow operate throughout the site. ‘Carscape,’ which is connected to adjacent streets, includes the primary ramping car circulation routes and a dispersed network of parking areas. The ‘Displayscape’ moves across the field in varying densities, agglomerating to become lifestyle parks. The ‘Softscape,’ which operates as a front yard, modulates between the two, utilizing landscape elements to enhance mood, create connections and produce barriers. Noting that suburbia’s problems lay in its generic cast, the entrants propose a “lifestyle park,” recasting the mall as a community which embraces and is branded by particular lifestyles - heavily drawing on existing domestic models espoused by magazines such as Wired, Wallpaper* or Martha Stewart Living. “Identity construction is enabled through these lifestyle parks. People know what they are buying - not just the object, but the lifestyle and mood associated with the object as well. Shoppers’ buying decisions are directly related to their construction of identity.” The Nu’burban mall optimistically integrates pre-selected, specific typologies of housing, retail and leisure modes into the space of a pre-imagineered, self-reflective environment responsive to the shoppers’ and community’s interests.

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Pell MallVallejo Plaza Mall, Vallejo, CA

Stoner Meek landscape and urbanismSussanah Meek, Jill Stoner, Katherine Fauret, Heather Moore, Dan Perez

The Pell Mall in Vallejo is conceived as a new public space, one that welcomes diversity of expression. As a green space, it both literally and symbolically heralds an attitude of optimism and conservation. The scheme relies on the notion of “hybrid econom-ics.” a partnership theory in which public policy, philanthropy and commercial sales combine to form a long-term strategy for development. The project seeks to consolidate the dying Vallejo Mall with an adjacent, defunct K-Mart and then ‘piggy-back’ onto the remediation of the nearby wetlands recently funded through the “White Slough Specific Plan.” By flooding some areas of the parking lots and demolishing the two existing structures, the mall is to be literally compacted into a 1000-meter-long by 60-meter-wide “coffin” on top of which recreational and leisure programs are framed. This new sliver of land is meant to function similarly to that of Pall Mall in London (on which this project’s name plays) or the Mall in Washington DC. It offers the commu-nity of Vallejo new forms of public space in addition to an active and natural newly-renovated ecosystem which allows the bird life in the area to replenish itself and flourish. A series of landscape strategies are deployed to marry recreation and economy. A number and variety of walls are deployed as points of commerce and activity and as a measure by which to frame the activities of the new mall. In addition a series of islands are developed to support a car mall (specifically electric car sales) which would allow visitors to shop for cars while wandering around the wetlands. The final phase of the proposal introduces a wind mall, a wind farm to power the city. By combining elements the city cur-rently lacks, this project hopes that the mall will be the center of a new, planned, ecologically-minded community redevelopment strategy.

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ARTMallCloverdale Mall, Toronto, ON

An Te Liu

“This project proposes the relatively simple conver-sion of the Cloverdale Mall into a regional, national and international art-going destination: Cloverdale ARTMall. With relatively few changes made to the exterior or interior of the existing mall, the new ARTMall will consolidate a large number of arts institutions, galleries and art-related services. ARTMall will feature three new anchor institutions - a new MoMA branch location, a new much needed home for the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art (mocca) and an environmentally sound art storage facility (artSTOR).” This project will use the open spaces as temporary installation space and for gathering areas for special art-related events. The precedents cited for this activity are Bergamot Station in Los Angeles and Mass MoCA outside Boston - both assemblages of abandoned industrial buildings.

PrisonDutchess Mall, Fishkill, NY

Jolie Kerns, Irene Cheng, Brett Snyder

The entrants make two simple observations about Dutchess county: the oversupply of retail program-ming (which led to the closure of the Dutchess Mall) and the undersupply of prison facilities in the region (a problem when one considers the quickly rising incarceration rates). “Both are vast programs suggesting megastructures, and both traditionally have been introverted spaces, closed to the exterior while facilitating complex and dynamic interior events.” Using the existing 30’x100’ storefront grid of the mall, the entrants propose to develop several basic incarceration modules that could be recom-bined to offer a variety of new, emerging prison typologies. The entrants also draw on the condi-tions present in the mall in its transformation into a prison, seeking to reinforce the interface of the prison with the community and the prison’s general productivity within the state.

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E-commerzDedham Plaza, Dedham, MA

Paul Lukez ArchitecturePaul Lukez, Matt Ostrow, Ben Gramawn, Caerie Goff, Jie Zhao

The current state of dilapidation is the result of the landlord deliberately neglecting the property to eventually win control of all the leases. Many of the businesses have already left for other, newer malls nearby leaving those remaining (unable to move for one reason or another) without adequate facilities or potential consumers. The entrant proposes to re-conceptualize the mall as part of the larger e-commerce retail system, developing a “frictionless economy” which seeks to eliminate the number of “middlemen” between the producers and consum-ers and to provide “e-tailers” a physical presence to complement their virtual one online. To combat typical mall redevelopment strategies, the entrant will reveal the site’s latent identity through an over-lay and process of tracing the site’s history, natural and artificial forces, community needs, infusion of new programs, and vagaries of time...

Geri-MallWestfield Shoppingtown, Culver City, CA

Ben Pohn

What began as a ‘super-regional’ mall at its opening in 1975, providing trendy retail to an ultra-large catchment area, has seen its appeal narrow in recent years. The entrant proposes to add a mix of both regional and local programs and in particular explore the addition of three continuing care facilities (Independent and Assisted Living) of approximately 125-150 units each. The so-called ‘Geri-Mall’ attempts to accommodate the rapidly increasing elderly population and seeks to create an environment which will allow and foster interaction between its residents and the surrounding communities. By selectively demolishing portions of the four-level parking deck, and upgrading the structural strength of the roof, the entrant proposes to develop gardens, housing and limited medical facilities to help the mall settle into its elderly age.

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Zoo = LifeCarousel Center Company, Syracuse, NY

EBB DesignEvan Bennett, Rufus Bates, Matt Ferrari, Jake Bates

To enhance the life of the mall, the entrants create a living program, reinforcing the need for a mall to entertain its users. Based implicitly on the notion that the necessity of shopping itself is no longer adequate enough to bring people to a mall, the entrants introduce the concept of a zoo which reinforces the spatial paradigms of the mall itself: those of “picturesque promenades, strong iconography, and arbitrary circulation.” Through the combination of “new nature,” living exhibits, aquariums and petting zoos, the mall is recast as an Arcadian pleasure ground meant to provide the city of Syracuse with a zoo as well as to offer a reason to come to this mall instead of any other.

interface, animall, & BrautiganBig Town Mall, Mesquite, TX

maruszczak & connah atelierJ.P. Maruszczak, Roger Connah, Aaron Lindsey, Lauren Philips

By “taking revenge on the asphalt” this proposal seeks to use architecture itself for the Big Town Mall’s transformation but not in the manner of the “recognizable architecture” derived from the lexicon of standard mall renovation strategies, but instead through a “mongrel architecture,” one devoted to tracing a strategy for an ongoing solution to the cycle of birth and death of contem-porary retail. The mall property almost becomes a free-build zone allowing a variety of interests to integrate themselves in proximity to the host. Whether by “franchise-pods,” a “liquid wrap,” “index environments” or experimental terrain for new media and technologies (and their concomitant commercial objectives) the renovated space would serve as a condenser for “imaginative collaborative, civic and individual, social and economic [systems] integrating with subcultures.”

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Doughnut UrbanismCity Center Mall, Columbus, OH

in.formJeffrey Goupil, Kevin Wagniewski, Darrin Wagniewski

“The city itself [is becoming] a doughnut” muse the authors who notice that the suburban ring around Columbus, Ohio continues its development and densification while the center of the city is left for naught. Other malls, placed at the edge of town and within the suburban ring, are much more suc-cessful largely because they are closer to where everyone lives. In part based on an analysis of the Campo de Fiore in Rome, the entrants propose to reconfigure the framework of an existing master plan for the center of town and propose replanning a retail strategy alongside the addition of a signifi-cant number of housing units. Their scheme hinges on the relocation of an “incompatible” department store into a newly-built, adjacent mall. The vacated building would then be turned into housing. The new mall would also be roofed by housing and tie into the new public space just outside its walls.

Sports Oriented Renovation and AdaptationBig Town Mall, Mesquite, TX

Sterling Barnett LittleJeremy Hahn, Beau Smith, Tate Selby

The entrants found that this mall, which hadn’t been renovated since 1989, was typical of edge city malls in that they have little hope of survival as long as other, newer malls in the region are being intro-duced. The entrants found that there were nine high schools in nearby communities, each of which were lacking in athletic facilities - particularly ice hockey and soccer, two of the fastest growing sports in Texas. The scheme seeks to make the former mall a center for after-school athletic activities and keeps the original dumbbell scheme of the mall, placing a sporting goods store as one anchor and a skating / hockey rink as the other. They propose to remove the roof of the main circulation spine and programmatically reinforce this space by selective demolition along it to make room for newer specific spaces devoted to sports, after-school education and leisure.

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Education Mall“Shop - In” Mall, Rishon-le-Zion, ISRAEL

Hila Weiss, Shira Levin

The entrants cite the mass immigration into Israel and this community as the source of the mall’s troubles. While developers show no sign of slowing their continual introduction of new retail program-ming and ever-newer malls, the government by contrast has been less expedient about the intro-duction of new schools. Based on the comparison of school planning typologies to mall planning typologies, the entrant seeks to convert the mall into a school that would house classes and shop space in former retail spaces while simultaneously dispersing the ‘green’ and recreational spaces of the school throughout the mall.

Hallway RetailingThe Mander Center, Wolverhampton, UK

Paperthin ArchitectureJonathan Wong, Caroline King

The critical element the entrants find necessary to consider with this mall, slated for renovation soon, is its connection to the city and to its consumers. First, they find that although the mall sits in the middle of the city, it is perceived as “alien” and they insist that its renovation must “rupture” the boundary between the mall’s internal world and that of the city, making it more porous. Second, through their analysis of the existing signage in the mall, they found that the storefront planes “com-press the space both literally and metaphorically...this plane is the critical interaction between offer and acceptance, between retailer and consumer.” Their strategy is to break the shoe-box design of the stores by designating the traditional retail space as storage and the corridor of the mall as a more intensely organized selling space. The storefronts become a mere surface and the corridor a space that reinforces human transactions.

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