Vampire-Chic Zombie Malls: A Hot Topic.
I walk past the exterior entrance of the Childrens’ Theater that used to be the old Eckred drug store, where bits of hand-painted set from the recent production of James and the Giant Peach occupy the glass storefront. I duck into the Barnes and Noble, where the café manager mans the panini press she’s been forced to use to cook everything with since the Turbochef oven broke. She’s trying really hard. She’s doing a great job. It’s a good little café. There are a lot of good things about this place.
Something is starting to happen in this corner of the mall. Between the theater in the old drug store and one of the city’s last surviving bookstores, under an arcade of mismatched lightbulbs, it’s starting to feel special. The hopelessly unfashionable decor is starting to become kitsch. Somehow, the impossible is happening: it’s all starting to feel authentic. It’s starting to feel like a real place, like it belongs here. I don’t know how, exactly, but this could be a great place if they can just keep it from falling down.
-Harrison Floyd, excerpt from Mallwalking (Pulitzer still pending)
In “Retrofitting Suburbia, Ellen Dunham-Jones and/or June Williamson write that “as counters to ‘instant architecture,’ these legacies contribute a sense of history, diversity, affordability, and a reduction of waste. The resulting quirks contribute enormously to the creativity and quality of the place making. They can also insert a cool factor to suburban places.”
You know what? I think so, too. Specifically, I’m thinking about the dead mall by my house: Richland Fashion Mall. If it sounds familiar, it might be because I spent a lot of time in History and Theory 3 talking about this specific mall, and Hunter’s mentioned it in at least one in his blog posts.
Former Parisian department store, Richland Fashion Mall
The thing about fashion is that it changes so quickly (except when it doesn’t: the International Style is the aviator sunglasses of architecture) and the transition between au courant and breathtakingly dated is often quick and unforgiving. Bad for stylized buildings, obviously, because barring some major disaster the building should far outlast the style trends that informed their décor.
The supposedly-swank fashion mag office of '90s sitcom Just Shoot Me
But fashion is cyclical, and some of these buildings are getting to the point where, if they’re still standing, some of these artifacts, either the superficial baubles that adorn them or the major elements that serviced no-longer-existent programs, aren’t looking so bad. Or, more specifically, they’re looking so bad that they’re a curiosity. They’re Walter White’s Pontiac Aztec: a character unto themselves.
Here’s my hypothesis: that postmodern bullshit that makes so many of these dead malls so terrible is going to become trendy again. Not that we’re going to make more of it, but they stuff that remains, the post-modern ruins and their styrofoam columns and the central escalator cores, they’re going to become curious throwbacks to the malls that died and became something else. I say just leave a lot of that stuff and use the resources to make the rest of the project better. I’m thinking escalator waterfalls. Or just escalators: nobody’s talking about escalators anymore. I bet that a bunch of people are going to suddenly wake up one day and think that the 1980 Venice Biennale seemed like a great idea.
I think the more that we fight these desperately uncool spaces, the harder the time we’re going to have making them appealing. I think if we’re going to try to turn these old establishments into new ones, we should try to embrace that and to celebrate the fact that we’re repurposing stuff by acknowledging the old junk in the architecture. Maybe not as explicitly as, say, simply throwing a toilet in a Gadzooks and calling it an apartment, but I do feel like it’d be cooler if you could tell someone that you were living in what used to be a mall and, once alerted to it, the heritage would be obvious as it is with so many of the old mill buildings that have been converted into trendy apartments.
Comments
Post a Comment