WA/SA [waldrip architects/ s.a.] [architecture- los angeles]
Alberti, Sandro Made-to-Order; 8 March, 2003 [text30]
Working 9-5, at...
‘WA/SA’, ‘Aloha8’, and ‘Working 9 to 5, at...’
are fictions of fen-om: [www.fen-om.com]
Dead Malls, a most-popular LA competition, has come to a close this weekend, with a final exhibit of the 21 finalist projects (5 winning entries), as well as a handful of essays on the topic. Some interesting
ideas to be found in some of those writings, although, lamentably, most simply ‘ramble on’. Alan Loomis focuses on The Grove, one of the latest-hottest malls in the Los Angeles region, a paradigm from which to salvage production ‘Dead Malls’. and political establishments within the mall, as well as ‘sustainable economy’. Also interesting in this essay, but not fully developed, is the (re)visit of the Farmers Market (Grove neighbor and prototype of the ‘mall island’, but with a twist). Something for a future essay, perhaps. Michael Bohn travels to CityPlace in Long Beach, from which he derives some interesting recipes for mall design, keeping his main suggestions within the realm of the popular ‘shopping + housing’ utopia. Most of Bohn’s conclusions are logical, although some, like the complete concealment of parking structures (as opposed to their reevaluation/ restructuring) falls back on traditionalist rhetoric. Finally, the Florian’s Company tongue-in-cheek ‘spoof’ on mall creation nearly loses any analysis within a flood of metaphoric sarcasm (extraction of some general rules of mall design, which I have done below, does not in itself yield truly enlightening info, but readies the facts for more interesting analysis than the mere display of fictionwriting prowess). The full essays + more are available at the LA Forum’s Web site [www.laforum.org].
Loomis, Alan; The Once and Future Mall … As the penultimate evolution of the mall, The Grove is neither innovative nor particularly imaginative. The dilemma… [is a] failure to expand the mall’s range of typological or urban performance… [It] reinforces entertainment retail as the only legitimate activity for creating urban places,… to the exclusion of production (the workplace) and living (housing), and at the expense of a sustainable urban economy founded in a physical form that balances land uses with transit needs… [It divorces from] productive, domestic, or civic/ political life…([let us remember that] Gruen viewed the shopping mall as the suburbs’ social center, and the inclusion of local culture and political establishments was integral to his early mall formulas)… The congested popularity of The Grove and its architectural and decorative symbolism
Mini-Mall.
The Grove.
Parking lot.
