The Mall

Esra Durukan

“Eating oysters with boxing gloves, naked, on the 9th floor”. Rem Koolhaas calls this unusual club scene the nature of metropolis and and he claims that the citizens of this world would desire and adapt juxtaposed conventional events.

In Los angeles juxtaposed diversity of events can be found in Americana mall, in Glendale. Lake next to a flea market next to a nike store next to a mini tram and tram plays Michael buble song, while fake snow is snowing but it’s 80 degrees you are in your flipflops.

However in Americana mall events are organized to create a specific ambience. It planned to look like collective urban environment and it gets this idea from 19th century Paris, urban character Flaneur. Mr. Flaneur wonders around the city kiosks for painters, parks where people socialize and music pavilion for volunteer musicians. Like the reason in Americana mall music is playing behind the bushes. To set the mood. And if you wanted to live in urban this is what you do. So Americana is strangely sneaking in Flaneur’s urban lifestyle into a 21st century of Los Angeles.

This project is interested in acceleration of intense diversity of conflicting and fragmented events that desired from its citizens. Taking up a city block that has mono-functions, mostly residential and couple retail spaces. And breaks the floor to floor relation of Koolhaas’s Athletic club to more 3 dimensional relational spaces.

Lot boundaries would be kept and owners can introduce any program in their lot, but also can share larger programs with neighbours also. That way, local density spots would be created collectively and spreaded throughout the city where not just increase the value of the block but surroundings also.

Downtown Athletic Club, Starett & Van Vleck

The Downtown Athletic Club stands on the bank of the Hudson River near Battery Park, the southern tip of Manhattan. Built in 1931, its 38 stories reach a height of 435 feet. Large abstract patterns of glass and brick make its exterior inscrutable and almost indistinguishable from the conventional Skyscrapers around it. This serenity hides the apotheosis of the Skyscraper as instrument of the Culture of Congestion.

The Club represents the complete conquest - floor by floor - of the Skyscraper by social activity; with the Downtown Athletic Club the American way of life, knowhow and initiative definitevely overtake the theoretical lifestyle modifications that the various 20th-century European avantgardes have been insitently proposing, without ever managing to impose them. In the Downtown Athletic Club the Skyscraper is used as a Constructivist Social Condenser; a machine to generate and intensify desireable forms of human intercourse within the metropolis.

Source: Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York