A love letter to the American mall

Abstract

In 1956, Victor Gruen designed the first climate controlled shopping center in the United States, giving birth to the regional mall. Gruen's wish for the Mall was to provide a civic center to participate in modern community life which was traditionally served by the urban downtown. But the origins of the mall do not come without developers. And developer performa became synonymous with the mall. Expansive parking, anchor stores, mall kiosks and, most importantly, the aestheticization of High Architecture, all became the staples of the mall. Because even though High Architecture did not want anything to do the mall, the mall wanted everything to do with High Architecture. The mall became a mash up between the aestheticization of High Architectural forms and the cheapest building technologies of the moment. For a while the regional mall had its success. But by 1991 mall construction had dropped by half from the previous year and continued to slow until 2006 when the last enclosed mall was built. But where did the mall go? Increased competition from bigger retailers and a shifting client base transitioning to digital forms of consumerism left the mall unable to compete as a retail strategy. Essentially, shopping left the mall. But Amazon wasn't the only one to blame. The suburbs of the 1950's are not the contemporary suburbs. The baby boomers are still there, aging in place, but they are now joined by a younger more diverse group of minorities that make up the majority of the population in 17 metropolitan regions. In addition, the suburbs are now home to 3 million more households that fall under the poverty line than in cities. Without the "ideal" demographic within the suburbs there is no money in the mall and without the money there is no developer. But now that the developer has left, THIS is the time for the mall! The thesis seeks to question the urban legacy of the mall and ask how does one take the architectural logic, urban logic, and even capitalist logic of the mall and turn them inside out? How can architecture activate these spaces, activate the forms they deploy, and activate the mash up nature of these different kinds of interior logics in a way that completely subverts the original intention? The research situates itself in contemporary conversations about typological familiarity and estrangement. The thesis uses the site of Northridge Mall in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, a prototypical regional mall, as a testing ground to explore the re-imagining of the American mall. The thesis sees the mall as a new type of public space for contemporary suburbia through the deployment of typological mall logics.