October 23, 2008
big box flip-a-strip and darwinian retail
[the former site of RPM Indoor Racing in Round Rock, Texas via Google Maps]
A couple nights ago All Things Considered had a feature on the recent work of Julia Christensen, who has been studying the re-use of big box stores for several years now, a project that has recently culminated the publishing of the book Big Box Reuse. The variety of uses she encounters is astounding:
"In Austin, Minn., Christensen went to a big box that had been renovated into a museum devoted to Spam, the canned meat. In Fayetteville, N.C., she went to a flea market that had once been a Kmart. And in Round Rock, Texas, a group of young entrepreneurs turned an abandoned Wal-Mart into an indoor racecar track. Christensen cites the racecar track for its imaginative use of such a large space -- but they couldn't keep up with the overhead costs and had to close down.Christensen says cities have a huge incentive to find other uses for these buildings.
"Roads are widened. Stoplights put in. Entire bypasses might be created," she says. "So all of this invested infrastructure remains after the retailer leaves the building behind."
Which can make these sites good for repurposing. Take Lebanon, Mo. When a Kmart there went bankrupt, its building was left vacant for three years, and the area became depressed. So the community raised money to turn it into a new and bigger county library.
Cathy Dame, the library's director, says it took awhile for some people to adjust.
"Sometimes, honestly, it was easier to say, 'Remember where the shoe section was? That's our children's room," Dame says.
Since the structure was too big for just the library, they broke it up and now share it with a Route 66 museum and a cafe, among other things. And Dame says they are getting a lot of traffic, partly because it's easy to park."
Designers, naturally, have other ideas about what form reuse should take. One such vision is the work of Paul Lukez, in the Suburban Transformations projects:
[E-Mall Transformation, Paul Lukez Architecture]
Lukez collects several such projects in the book version of Suburban Transformations, which I recommend. In it, he lays out not merely an aesthetic vision, but a working methodology for implementing an incremental urbanism in suburbia, which happens to be one of my pet projects (hence the recommendation). Much of what Lukez suggests -- overlaying various site conditions to reveal synchronicities and disjuncts, for instance -- will seem like old news to landscape architects schooled in McHargian methodologies, but putting such methodologies to the service of an incremental urbanism seems new and useful to me (and even if it weren't new, it would still be useful).
Lukez more or less acknowledges this, suggesting that the value of his project is not that it is completely new and revolutionary, but that it presents a distillation of the most useful components of Smart Growth, environmental planning, and New Urbanism, while accepting (rather than ignoring or attempting to bypass) the elements of time and change. In the interests of not using up too much space on the screen here, I've only shown two snapshots in from the complex timeline of potential transformation Lukez sketches; an animation can be seen here which gives a much fuller impression of the importance of incrementality to Lukez's vision.
Another set of visions was recently collected in the "Flip-a-strip" competition (via Landscape+Urbanism). Susan Krane, former director of the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art (which sponsered the competition), describes the competition's origins and aims:
"And so, when we at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art began to discuss the idea of initiating an architectural competition that might be national in scope and application yet have core local significance, it seemed most fitting to address a building type that impacts our public sense of place. Strip malls, ever in our peripheral vision, immediately came to mind. The choice purposefully ran contrary to Arizona's predominant recent reputation for high-style residential architecture. What could be farther toward the other end of the spectrum from luxurious mega-houses on desert hillsides than the strip mall in the flats? The everyday, work-a-day strip mall seemed so wanting of smart architectural attention, ripe and useful for reconsideration--in this community and in so many others across the country. This competition thus intended dually to take SMoCA's architectural exhibitions to the next stage and to highlight the keen social awareness and the broad capacity of a new generation of architects working here and in other regional centers of design excellence....
Working with an amazing community advisory committee of architects, planners, developers and urban entrepreneurs, we decided that Flip a Strip should address small, one-to-three-acre, mid-block strip plazas--the most abundant and most vulnerable parcels that lack the anchor tenants of larger sites and missed out on the attention-grabbing positioning of intersections. Most of these strip malls date from the 1960s and 1970s and still yield reliable cash flow for the landowners, regardless of vacancies or disrepair. They provide affordable spaces for small businesses and often service vibrant new-immigrant communities. One can easily find malls around town with exclusively Korean or Spanish signage. In addition, several strips of this scale here have been given facelifts on shoestring budgets by adventurous small-time entrepreneurs: they quickly have been adopted as hip gathering spots for those drawn to impressive, locally owned concerns such as an alternative record store, a homey coffee-shop hangout or an artisanal patisserie. Such grassroots, lifestyle-oriented enterprises demonstrate the potential across the Phoenix area, which has precious few "third spaces" and little street life. What more, Flip a Strip asks, could be possible with good architecture in the mix? How might discrete efforts at such "suburban villages" be knit together to alter not just one parcel of land but the look and feel of cities' prime corridors?"
The winning entry, Urban Battery, was designed by MOS:
[MOS::Urban Battery; competition images via bustler]
MOS describe their entry, which transforms by layering program upon program:
"In terms of zoning, Urban Battery is a physical structure similar to a power station, vertical greenhouse, and a billboard, all rolled into one. It doesn't fit into the zoning chart. We believe that Scottsdale zoning is open enough to accommodate the programmatic innovation, even though this proposal is beyond the original intention of the competition. Urban Battery acts as an energy producer, filtering air, housing oxygen regenerating plants, providing bike paths, public gardens within the structure, and stores bioproducts. It also includes an additional building for community events that is attached at the base of the structure. This additional program could be for either teens or seniors dedicated to expanding activities from the neighborhood and accessible through a new bike and walking path, converting the alley into part of an urban infrastructure."
Other projects explore more commonly offered (but also potentially transformative) possibilites such as rooftop agriculture and the provision of community market space.
There is a wide distance, though, between the exuberant renderings of projects proposed by these architects and the actual reuse projects that Christensen explores in Big Box Reuse, such as this elementary school in Laramie, WY:
[source: Big Box Reuse]
or this future church in Pinellas Park, FL:
[source: Big Box Reuse]
Even the cheery constructions, such as the Spam museum, a Wal-Mart which has received a facade-lift, are quite banal:
[source: Big Box Reuse]
Perhaps these banal re-purposings will inevitably outnumber more creative and vibrant transformations; or perhaps it will simply take time and distance for better reuses to win out -- like this "70's slum block building" recently repurposed by Jonathan Segal Architect, in San Diego (via Archidose):
[source: Jonathan Segal Architect, via Archidose]
These discussions take on a new urgency now, as retailers are experiencing the pain of the current credit crash -- Linens 'n' Things, I hear, has already gone bankrupt, unable to find buyers for the vast majority of its properties, while Circuit City is shuttering a fifth of its stores. The future we and our exit towns face seems grim, with doors shuttered, parking lots cracked by stray grasses and Ailanthus altissima, windows blackened. All of this has assumed that this is bad (and obviously, in many ways, it is). But what if it is also necessary? What if this is how the exurban experiment dies? Or perhaps both scenarios are valid; perhaps the best structures will find reuse, whether beautiful like Lukez's proposals or merely utilitarian, like the elementary school in Wyoming, while those structures which never should have been built will wither, cast-off tributaries of a river of credit that no longer exists.
More:
::I discussed an Atlantic Monthly article about the abandonment of suburbia in the post "mommy, there's a crack house in our cul-de-sac".
::Another interesting item on All Things Considered which I discussed a couple months ago, involving a legal battle between billboards and trees.
::Visit bigboxreuse for a tour of various reused stores as well as a wiki for submitting and georeferencing new reuse projects.
::Julia Christensen also appears on NPR's On Point, discussing big box reuse. Various callers and other experts weigh in as well.
::MOS have posted a video of a prototype of the system for Urban Battery. I haven't watched it yet, but I'm sure its interesting.