Junkspace: The New Frontier

Picture this: it is the year 2051 and a group of college students decide to go have a night out at the hottest new spot in the city; STRIP. It is all the rage they are hearing about. The new nightlife hotspot has some of the best drinks and food in the city all located in a newly renovated strip mall from the 2010s. Once a thriving shopping and retail development center that was home to the once famous Michael's Crafts Store, ACE Hardware, and the fashionista TJ Maxx is now a large single owned space that offers individual nooks and pods of different functions and entertainment. It’s the little touches like the custom fabricated shopping cart lounge chairs and hanging your iCoat on a fully restored clothing rack that truly transport you back in time to those historic social media days of clunky technology and overwhelming in-person consumerism. But now you get to have a few drinks and bask in the artificial recreation of the golden age of Junkspace consumerism.

How crazy would it be if the way developers and architects transform old industrial age warehouses into thriving social hotspots that we see repeated today and that same mindset is what strip malls and brick and mortar stores have in their very near future? I’m not sure it is all that crazy. Especially in this global pandemic, it is obvious that Junkspace is facing its biggest threat yet. The absolute banning on consumerism. Malls and big box stores have already been suffering in the age of internet consumerism, but this will be a drastic defining moment in the way Junkspace is manipulated to remain a relevant factor in the background of society.

Rem Koolhaas’s interesting notion of Junkspace is equally scary, yet opportunistic given the current social and economic trends that threaten its very existence. Do I think that we are in a capitalistic state to the point of Junkspace always being a presence? Absolutely. Will the appearance of Junkspace transform and adapt into society as technology and consumerism changes? Absolutely. Is that a bad thing? I don’t think so. Junkspace has an opportunity to exist with society in a nonthreatening way, but it is the responsibility of designers to shape that relationship by being critical of technology, consumerism, and space.