Suburban malls may be a dying breed, but in cities from New York to Hong Kong, new malls are thriving by seamlessly blending into the urban fabric.
Starting from New York, on the way to the 9/11 memorial, eyes may get by the Oculus’s unusual architecture: from the outside, the Santiago Calatrava-designed ribbed structure reminds you a dinosaur skeleton; inside, with tourists and selfie sticks.
But the Oculus, named after the eyelike opening at the apex that lets in light, is more than a piece of striking architecture. It exists as a mall, with more than a hundred stores, and as a hub connecting office buildings in Brookfield Place and One World Trade Center with 11 subway lines and Path trains, serving 50,000 commuters every day. That’s a lot of eyeballs on shopfronts. “Shop. Eat. Drink. Play. All under one magnificent roof.”
Oculus was $1.4bn bet that New York, a city known for its love of the street, could also have a successful mall. And judging from the crowds, it counters the narrative that the mall is “dead”, like those thousands of empty suburban malls dotting the American landscape.
A new breed of shopping centres like Westfield World Trade Center Oculus, is integrating so seamlessly into its urban surroundings that it can be difficult to draw any line between city and mall whatsoever. All around world urban areas like London’s Boxpark, Las Vegas’s Downtown Container Park and Miami’s Brickell City Centre are examples of mall-like environments that try to weave into the street life of a city.
It raises the question: was the enclosed, suburban mall, located far from the city centre, a discontinuity? An invention for the age of cheap fossil fuel?
Malls first appeared in suburbs in the 1950s, when “reducing energy was not a priority”. The more you move shopping away from where people live, the more you increase transportation’s impact on the environment.
While the idea of the shopping mall becoming ‘urban’ has a certain appeal, the net effect is to turn the city into a shopping mall. Thus the mall is not “dead”. It has simply transformed to cities themselves. They become a city. Tens of thousands of people work, live and play in a single megastructure, without ever having to leave.
Source: All under one roof: how malls and cities are becoming indistinguishable
Starting from New York, on the way to the 9/11 memorial, eyes may get by the Oculus’s unusual architecture: from the outside, the Santiago Calatrava-designed ribbed structure reminds you a dinosaur skeleton; inside, with tourists and selfie sticks.
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| Santiago Calatrava’s Oculus, Westfield’s $1.4bn bet on a New York City mall. |
Oculus was $1.4bn bet that New York, a city known for its love of the street, could also have a successful mall. And judging from the crowds, it counters the narrative that the mall is “dead”, like those thousands of empty suburban malls dotting the American landscape.
A new breed of shopping centres like Westfield World Trade Center Oculus, is integrating so seamlessly into its urban surroundings that it can be difficult to draw any line between city and mall whatsoever. All around world urban areas like London’s Boxpark, Las Vegas’s Downtown Container Park and Miami’s Brickell City Centre are examples of mall-like environments that try to weave into the street life of a city.
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| Boxpark turned shipping containers into an ‘urban mall’ that merges directly with the London street |
Malls first appeared in suburbs in the 1950s, when “reducing energy was not a priority”. The more you move shopping away from where people live, the more you increase transportation’s impact on the environment.
While the idea of the shopping mall becoming ‘urban’ has a certain appeal, the net effect is to turn the city into a shopping mall. Thus the mall is not “dead”. It has simply transformed to cities themselves. They become a city. Tens of thousands of people work, live and play in a single megastructure, without ever having to leave.
Source: All under one roof: how malls and cities are becoming indistinguishable
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