The Benefits of Retrofitting
The reading of retrofitting suburbs by Ellen Dunham-Jones and June Williamson really caught my attention because the idea of retrofitting suburbs is a concept that I explored last year in my professional practice 2 class with Kate Schwennsen. For this class, we had to pick a site of our choice and propose a change to it. This immediately made me think of North Point Mall in Alpharetta, Georgia. Over the past years, there has been an increase in construction in this area including a new downtown area and a new shopping mall 10 minutes from this site which has caused North Point Mall to become desolated. The retrofitting of this site would be highly beneficial to the community. It would not only take advantage of an existing site instead of building on undeveloped land, but it would also eliminate suburban fragmentation by adapting its program and retrofitting streets and blocks in order to provide more connected spaces and bring the community together. If we as architects focused on this concept, we would not only be giving life back to dead malls and parks but we would also be contributing to a healthier built environment by making existing buildings that consume a lot of energy more sustainable.
Thaly, I so agree! When reading Retrofitting Suburbia, I thought of my own dead, hometown mall. I could see endless opportunities to revitalize this massive amount of land into a vibrant, new center of community in High Point, North Carolina. There's places like this everywhere - crazy to imagine what might be if every town caught on to such an idea!
ReplyDeleteI would love to agree and see my own run down malls revitalized, but unfortunately I think many of these mall type spaces are either beyond repair or not worth saving. These buildings typically aren't the best produced spaces and are incredibly wasteful in their expanse. The largest issue is that people have moved on and left the infrastructure behind. There aren't people that can fill these spaces because they're somewhere else now. Let's say there is a successful rejuvenation of a mall. Where are those people coming from? Is there now another area left in disrepair because this mall has taken over the demand for a space that was being accomplished elsewhere?
ReplyDelete