retail Architects and urbanists, rather than retail developers

The lessons of Underhill’s work, derived from invaluable cold empirical research, delivers new agency to designers and their clients. The information base required for a critical and creative endeavor has been laid, something comparable to the phenomenon of the emergence of the architect-mathematician-technician paradigm. As retail increasingly requires the input of these new professionals, transdisciplinary hybrids are born in response to new necessity. What is the work of these specialists?

Architecture’s ability to provide a different scale of analysis, and the ability to organize many scales of information can offer synthesis to the multiple forms of research. A new form of practice should involve the god’s eye view paired with literally grounded modes of analysis and expression. The specifics about regional conditions, information understood from maps and aerial photographs, are among the elements. Another is the anthropological dimension vis a vis Underhill. “Architectural documents” are also invaluable, perhaps the key mid scale, itself an accommodation of multiple scales. Firms like NBBJ deal with things like this, though I am skeptical of the extent that the urbanist’s scale is consulted. At the level of infrastructure, allowing a distinction of urban and suburban with an understanding of the future, designers might better understand the link between suburbanism and shopping, the individual.


“After all, what do we really know, in the end, about why people buy? We know about the Invariant Right and the Decompression Zone. We know to put destination items at the back and fashion
at the front, to treat male shoppers like small children, to respect the female derrière, and to put the socks between the cash/wrap and the men's pants. But this is grammar; it's not prose. It is enough. But it is not much.” (Gladwell 15).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2GfOhFZkY8