mr. zepp, who are you?

The most bazaar and intriguing reading thus far this semester is Ira G Zepp’s “The Shopping Mall as Sacred Space.” His text categorizes current architectural practioners and theoreticians Rem Koolhaas and Keller Easterling, possibly the entirety of the discipline as “cynical”, rational, realists. It was hard to suspend disbelief or accept the “could be” of this text. With that said, I could access his discussion of Smithhaven Mall, in Smithtown, Long Island. I spent a lot of consuming time there, considering I resided twenty minutes due east in a small town titled Shoreham. Upon the entrance, I don’t discover the significant mall entrance as identified by Zepp. I enter [and touch] the first physical object of the exterior that is reflective of human scale; a 7’ tall aluminum frame glass doorway that punctures the typically windowless, concrete mall enclosure. Densities of cars more easily locate entrances to malls.

Strategies for mall formal organizations seem as purely functional consumption machine decisions. The crossings of lanes act as a means for fire safety and ease of access to parking. Any “existential center” is mashed by multitudes of sensory stimuli. It reminds me of what the suburbs lack, human interaction, beyond the daily service dialogues of purchasing gas, or ordering fast food. The mall is our interface, sensually an urban collective experience. We go to the centers to witness all the chaos and drama, the lacking of so many suburban lifestyles. Malls are optimizations of surface area and their center[S] are orientation devices. The prescribed fantasies of Ira Zepp seem to be misplaced by the unsymmetrical growth of Smithhaven Mall.

zoning and target zones

Victor Gruen and Larry Smith’s thorough account of the planning of shopping centers, (specifically site selection), recalls Keller Easterling’s descriptions of spatial products. Proper site and tenants for a future mall is determined by travel distances, purchasing power of regional population, accessibility etc. Gruen considers economists, developers, and architects equally important in the successful establishment of a shopping center.

Zoning is another important factor in the development of the shopping center. Longstreth talks about zoning as a mid nineteenth century development specifically tied to the unsanitary nature of the industrial city. Out of necessity, families left the city to secure a healthy domestic environment separate from the unhealthy workplace of the city center. Another case of segregation at the time was “target market” which dictated the selection of tenants for a mall.

Gimme Shelter in malls

The idea of malls keeps evolving from time to time and the readings for this week are no different. This week, is about the idea of the drive in shopping centers and how it was part of the “mall culture.” Arcades and malls were successful in it’s time due to the fact that people can be dropped off in front of these places from their carriages and so forth and do what they do within the shopping arcade. However, with the invention of the automobile, traveling became easier and more ground was covered. This presented a problem for shopping malls and arcades because the drivers of the cars wouldn’t be able to get a good view of the stores because they were interior. In order to solve this problem, they created strip malls which are outdoor malls basically and you can drive around and see if any of the stores catch your interest from inside your own car. You wouldn’t have to step outside the vehicle to shop and view the store facades, that is until something catches your eye.

Just like how drive in movie theaters, and drive in restaurants were in fashion back then, the outdoor strip mall, just like the drive in movie theater and restaurant are out of date and they have reverted back to their old ways. Everything today is about the exploring the interior what it looks like from the inside. Not many people want to drive around in their car and explore the strip mall and be secluded from the rest of the shoppers. Parking is secondary and it’s all about going inside the mall, exploring, congregating, and most importantly, buying items. Shopping inside, exploring the interior, meeting new people and seeing new items is the way it should be and if I had to shop someplace where I had to be cutoff from the world in order to shop, I rather not shop at all because that defeats the whole purpose of shopping and interacting. As the Rolling Stones best put it, gimme shelter or I’ll fade away; putting it in strip malls vs. indoor malls sense, or course.

Strip mall or shopping center I can’t tell

With the introduction of the automobile in the early 20th century it seems that the commercial districts that once thrived, have now started to decline due to the introduction of the drive in market. Unlike the commercial districts which could be found in town centers the drive in market is a shopping complex that can be found closer to the neighborhood that you live in. “With the market as its anchor tenant and a drug store as a major support, the neighborhood center was an integrated facility planned to meet the every day shoppers needs” (Longstreth 41). The new shopping ideal was partly fueled by the automobile. Most of the new drive in markets feature auto centers in which your car can be repaired or serviced while you shop at the adjacent stores.

One example of a drive in market was called Chapman Park. It was considered an area wide attraction. They used billboards to advertise, which during this time period was relatively unheard of. It contained three food stores, which each sold something different, and an additional eight store units which contained office and studio spaces. The ideal was to appeal to the masses by offering food outlets and specialty shops to draw customers in. It was also one of earliest drive in markets to first offer interior parking, which gave the customers easy access to the all the store fronts.

The Chapman Park was an early example of what we today see all over the country. Shopping centers like Fayetteville town square and Marketplace Outlet Mall are the Chapman Park’s of the present day. They offer a variety of shops, restaurants, and even grocery stores to appeal to the people who live in the areas that they serve. These new drive in markets in some areas have also replaced the large shopping malls that we have also come accustomed to visiting. This goes to show that bigger is not all ways better and that convenience is the key in the retail environment.

Cyclical Malls?

Here we see another step up the evolution ladder of the mall; the drive-in shopping center. There are two keys aspects of this that I find especially interesting.

One of the first that I found most intriguing was, I believe, a rather positive thing. For the first time, this drive in model speaks not of competitiveness or one single “department” store dominating the other stores, but rather of collaboration. In Emile Zola’s novel we read of how angry other stores were because of the department store essentially stealing business and trying to sell everything, whereas, here will really see this idea of a “shopping center as being an area where one can go to find one “specialized product” that they like and then while there, finding other things they may need, or even want. This goes back to a comment that I posted quite some time ago, stating essentially that “Life was always about communal living and working where you lived, and things such as the city, the arcade, the eventual development of the mall, and even the industrial revolution all really changed the way that relationship worked” Well, now I find myself retracting some of that statement. Yes, life was more communal long ago, but the part I retract is that the mall itself may not really have been a part of that destruction. In some ways, I now realize that the mall actually encourages a sense of community. The way Longstreth spins the “communal” aspect of the “shopping center” makes me rethink the community aspect. He once said that places such as these first drive-in shopping centers were no longer about co-existence, but rather collaboration. They now wished to advertise as one unit or by advertising individual products they would be bringing in people who may find they need another product sold by a different retailer. “Operation expenses were shared, pricing policies coordinated, uniform hours kept, and identity consolidated” (Longstreth 41) They wanted to “minimize the distinction between stores” but rather truly build a shopping community. Longstreth even said that these shopping drive-ins were “little more than basic shelter” essentially saying that it wasn’t even about the structure or the design, it was about unification and accessibility to the new vehicle-driving-pedestrians.

As a second point of interest, I would like to pose a question. Does the evolution of “commerce” or commercial space evolve in a cyclical fashion? To explain this I bring forth the idea that this reading is acting as a stepping stone toward “the megamall” but I am wondering if it isn’t part of something else. We have two images from Longstreth next to two images of Fayetteville Towne Center. The left of the Longstreth’s is just hypothetical, as if the parking were removed and then the Longstreth image with the parking. Somehow we developed from centralized parking in an outdoor space with stores surrounding to the enclosed mall idea on the left of those two images with miles of parking surrounding it, right? Yet in the Fayetteville model, we see an enclosed mall reverting back to the parking space surrounded by stores. Why is this reversion happening? Are we going backward? Did this mall revert back for survival only, and if it worked, then why are we still building malls? Is DestinyUSA nothing more than carousel reverting from an enclosed mall to an open shopping center, merely masked by an absurdly large glass canopy?

measuring success

In each of these reading selections, the calculation of the best possible organization of stores and the resulting monetary intake, gains precedence over the stores’ individual characteristics. Is the measure of a successful project based solely on the developer’s financial success? Obviously not, but this seems to be part of the focus in these readings. Gruen and Smith meticulously describe all of the conditions that influence the success of a development, while Longstreth discusses the pros, cons, and evolution of the configuration of the types in Los Angeles. Both of them focus on the methods of the developer and architects who design these shopping centers, with distinct attention paid to the automobile’s effects on that design.

In Gruen and Smith’s prologue, they do touch on the well-being of the community and the relationship between good planning and community growth. However, this is not measured or really accounted for in the proceeding chapters, where they discuss the aspects of development that have different levels of importance in the calculation of desirability. They lay out very specifically the best conditions for the development of a shopping facility, which perhaps accounts for the generic quality of most shopping experiences, namely the smaller developments, like strip malls and town centers. I’m curious to know if their designs ever had the program that supported the positive civic activity (not just commercial activity), which architects generally crave and which they attribute to ‘good planning’.

On the flip side, perhaps these constructs are successful because they allow us, carried by our cars, to reach the product efficiently. If the layout, location, stores, and all the other conditions of shopping centers are successful financially for the developer, then the consumer has also benefited from this well-organized construct. The purpose of the shopping center is served if shopping is primary. Dreams of some kind of contemporary replacement for the public piazza, agora, or the medieval city square, will probably continue as dreams because of the individualism and swift dispersal provided by the automobile.

The Death of the Drive-In

With all of Longstreth's discussion of the convenience that cars brought to America and great expanses, I find myself wondering what became of all the "sporadic" experiments of the 1920's and 30's relating to drive-ins. The drive-in market and the Park and Shop are discussed at length, and I wonder...where did they go? At a glance it seems like there would be nothing more convenient than giving your grocery list to a clerk and having them find everything for you, so why would such a concept all but completely perish? Enough questions. I believe a lot of it has to do with the circumstances surrounding these 'experiments'. As Longstreth points out, places like drive-in markets were run by people like Peckham, who were not involved so much in the distribution of food, but simply "getting a return on their land" (38). Thus, I can only imagine that a certain 'magic' that some experience when grocery shopping might be removed by the pure economy someone like Peckham would be advertising. Not to mention that few of these stores were run by a manager, so despite people like Peckham hoping that the 'automation' of the drive-in would save money, there was probably ultimately a lot more confusion for both the employees and the consumer. By the 1950s, self-service was embraced nearly everywhere (170).

So what drive-ins still exist? For the most part, drive-in dining, drive-in banking, and drive-in theaters (though those are already a sort of 'vintage' notion and sadly on their way to extinction). One is entertainment-centered, one is economically-centered, and one is necessity-centered. Therefore, I have a lot of trouble understanding why people would be comfortable buying food quickly that they plan on immediately eating, versus grocery shopping when both deal with fulfilling a basic instinct. Perhaps because one focuses more on long term fulfillment? Or simply the true 'convenience' of it all. Who knows, maybe the time it would take a drive-in grocer to gather all your food may have been almost as long as it would take you to do it yourself, or maybe the owners realized that customers are more likely to buy food that isn't on their list if they're actually in the store seeing all the wonderful specials available...

Interdisiplinarity – The suburban shopping center

Gruen and Smith successfully describe the conglomeration that is designing a shopping center. Every step of the way it chalk full of analysis by various groups all trying to achieve a common goal at that step in the design process.

There are developers trying to find a piece of land. There are groups analyzing the accessibility and potential value of this piece of land. There are architects designing the buildings for this piece of land. There are legislators checking zoning requirements and laws regarding this area of land. There are community activists assessing the project to assure their townspeople that the project is beneficial. So much goes into planning a shopping center it is a surprise they keep popping up in every town across the US every year.

The shopping center has changed the suburban context forever. Now instead of having to shop in the downtown shopping district, you have a choice. Due to this choice, the shopping center has created unavoidable competition between companies as well as other shopping centers. This is all due to the impeccable planning and analysis that goes into a shopping center. Thorough evaluations of every detail of a shopping center must be put together by various groups in order to implement the perfect plan. The shopping center is just one more example of the powers of interdisciplinary cooperation. When multiple organizations are working together the product seems to always be of such higher quality. Any one group could attempt to plan something of this magnitude on their own, but the product would be simply insufficient.

Being able to have a network of resources from so many levels of unbiased analysis is a tool that is necessary in the planning of any large scale development, especially a commercial shopping center.

Destiny, Manifest.

From the very beginning, the American mentality has been largely influenced by the vast amount of space that we are able to inhabit. In our first years as a colony, if we wanted to expand our cities or our farms or our industry we simply moved west. Once we got past the Appalachians, there was nothing but an endless expanse of (seemingly) virgin land stretching all the way to the Pacific. So it is an interesting coinicidence (if you believe in those) that at the same time that America is beginning to come of age at the turn of the 20th century after enduring a bloody civil war and getting its industrial revolution underway (lagging the British by about 50 years), the automobile is invented. It was a potent match: new high-speed mode of personal transport coupled with a seemingly infinite amount of land and space upon which to make use of it. Obviously, the city most impacted by this new technology was Los Angeles, an impressionable infant city, already growing out of its training wheels. With tons of space, affordable cars, and lack of existing infrastructure, Los Angeles became the built paradigm of the 20th century with its drive-in markets, the precursor to still-prevalent strip-malls, quickly dominating the landscape. The parking lot was the new piazza (as Venturi as said about the parking lots on the strip of Las Vegas), the logical form to occur at major intersections, replete with fountains and Spanish theming, not unlike the proposed historical pastiche of Destiny's Italian hilltown scheme. In the 20th century, Manifest Destiny was realized, with the glory of America stretching uninterrrupted from coast to coast. And now in the 21st century, the west having been won for a century now, "Destiny" is moving back east, perhaps embodying the new American paradigm.

The Problem of Parking

In Richard Longstreth’s article, Is Main Street Doomed? In the Drive-in, the Supermarket, and the Transportation of Commercial Space in Los Angeles, the issue of parking in the new vehicular based shopping was a constant problem. As these shopping centers were exterior, as the enclosed shopping mall had yet to be designed, store owners wanted the greatest exposure of their store front as possible from the car.

The layouts of these new shopping centers was not centered on pedestrian access, but a layout was designed that would be best suited for the movement of the car around the building. These shopping centers catered to the consumers growing use and reliance on the automobile. The centers were planned to allow the best viewing of the stores as people drove around the mall.

While this was able to be done in the exterior shopping centers of the 1920s, today as the shopping center has become an enclosed entity, the center has become increasingly interior, with little definition of what is located on the inside, from the exterior. Parking for consumers has become less of an issue as parking is no longer set for individual stores, but for the shopping center as a whole.

Suburbia Shake-up

As people moved out into suburbia, department stores and other shops found out very quickly all they knew about selling merchandise needed to be thrown out the window. The influence the car had on the shopping world was more dramatic then I had imagined. Where to put your shop? How big should it be? Parking lot…what’s that for? Victor Gruen not only mentions all these new factors – location, zoning, financing, timing – but dives into the more overwhelming new issues. Even if I found the right location does it have the popular stores? If I have the right stores is it the appropriate size? It becomes apparent that with the popularity of the automobile and the development of suburbia, the shopping industry went into a panic. They lost confidence and comfort. Besides being in a foreign element, stores soon became a place to serve civic, cultural and social community needs. Compared with the original arcades the idea of shopping has now become more involved into everyday life. But as it became more complex, the actual goods become even less significant than in the downtown department store. Acceptable travel time; maximum being 25 minutes, to reach a regional shopping center was more of a determinate for a consumer to shop versus that it has quality items located there (Gruen 33). Seeing how these ideas became priorities gives a better understanding of why malls are the way they are today.

The Shopping Center Without Food

“A vast, unbroken space, neutral in character, with all the emphasis given to display…” (Longstreth 163). Society views art in the same way that it stares uninterestedly at the cantaloupes. What has now become the traditional gallery space for consumer produce, both fresh and aged, has existed for us since the National Gallery in Berlin. After guiding us through his clinical sifting of discarded and digested retail forms, the author has successfully managed to reconcile Mies and Von. Perhaps more promising than this reconciliation is that the German art pavilion was constructed twenty years after the American food market. Heroic modernism looks through its wide and tall glass to the bratwurst vendor capitalizing on its steps.

Mies envisions his gallery as a kind of second frame for art, materials and assemblies recede and recognize their supportive role in the production. Both constructs involve large unsupported expanses, and subtle instances of phenomenal transparency which again frame the food and art. The goods receive the most attention and are thus celebrated and given the role of the subject. Even the exterior envelopes develops in parallel, the thickness of the roof harkens to super service station, the formal girth above a cleared ground plane.

Where the Neue National hermetically seals its 20th c. early modernist art in a gesture of preventative measures, the nested glass boxes of ubiquitous retail are still reciting and mutating their script. Perseverance seems to be the spirit of these kinds of vernacular buildings, things as dynamic and profane as American cheese, ever-enriching economic protein. The system responsible for these models is tested in a harsh climate un-insulated by artistic vision, celebrity identity, obsessive historical progeny, and excessive pseudo-complexities. The desired effect is clear, the means always spinning. Architecture can continue to learn from these models, stepping outside its exquisite box and investing in retail.