Mini-mallism

MINI-MALLISM TIANCI HAN

RESEARCH & DESIGN 2014-2015

L d a w A e t c u

Th R o L

Los Angeles is like an expansive urban carpet with no end, smoothly woven by the continuous automobile roadnet. Moving on this colorful carpet, people rarely notice anything distinguishable, iconic or monumental. On the contrary, people see endless urban banality and everydayness, from which people actually enjoy a lot of convenience. The ignorance about urban form is part of the core Los Angeles spirit. Millions of indistinguishable places and everyday experience in the city comprise together as a single giant urban surface, into which everything is entangled so tightly that people can not find anything out of the context to represent the whole city as an icon (except for the Hollywood sign). Paradoxically, Los Angeles is on the other hand easy to be disentangled and categorized by series of urban figures like mini-malls, gas stations, motels and typical American houses. These basic urban elements are like components stored in the toolbox which can be assembled easily as a huge urban machine by following the simple instruction manual. For the everyday experience, these urban figures function equally as an unnoticeable small component of the urban mechanical system. However, when they are categorized and cut out of the urban context, it is clear to see that the figures in the same family share a strong design gene and typological characteristics, and each of them is actually an independent object in the meantime with a unique story behind it.

This ambiguous relationship between the urban figures and the context is more clearly articulated by the documenting artworks of contemporary artists like Catherine Opie and Ed Ruscha, from 1960’s to 1970’s. Thanks to Ed Ruscha and the followers inspired by him, we can see that the image of complicated Los Angeles can be easily understood as a collage of ordinary objects,‘Twentysix Gasoline Stations’, ‘Thirty-four Parking Lots’, ‘Fifteen Pornography Companies’, ‘Ten Convenient store’, ‘Thirty-six Fire Stations’, etc. Altogether, they are Los Angeles.

In 1970’s, Michael Fried wrote an article named ‘Art and Objecthood’ which cast great influence on the theory of minimalist art (AKA. literalist art) and the following trend of the development of contemporary art. The word ‘objecthood’ describes the condition to be objects with the uniqueness, singularity, and the particular relationship to a specific context. Reflected on the urban scale, ‘Objecthood’ is also a good media to rethink about the urban figure-context relationship in Los Angeles. Based on the pre-mentioned categorization of the city, the different objects redefined under the condition of urban objecthood, bear a close connection to the general context as part of the elements comprising the urban system,while simultaneously the objects are also possible to be entangled from the external relationship with the background and focused on the internal characteristics of themselves. Cut out of the universe urban background, the urban figures under the same category share the same fundamental genes distinguishing them from other categories as an independent group of objects. Furthermore, each of the objects also keeps their unreproducible unique identities. These uniqueness and singularities looked through the concept of objecthood generate more imagination or understanding beyond our everyday perception of these ordinary objects in the real city.

Mini-mall is one of the best examples to talk about the objecthood of urban figures in Los Angeles

Los Angeles

Jefferson

Boundary The original interest about mini-malls came from my personal experience in Los Angeles in 2014 when I lived in a low-income but convenient neighborhood near Koreatown. The mini-malls play a crucial role in people’s everyday life in the neighborhood. Gradually, I noticed that these mini-malls as non-stop urban figures are actually everywhere at the street corners, and I got so obsessed with these ordinary urban figures which have such a strong power to reproduce itself and adapt to different kinds of communities.

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Los Angeles Blocks

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Los Angeles Mini-malls

Kyoto Shrines and Temples

Boundary is the most interesting element to talk about the objecthood of mini-malls. As physical boundary, it distinguishes the building of mini-mall from the urban context surface as an isolated and enclosed space. Conceptually, there is also a cognitive boundary between the condition of the mini-mall to be an independent object and its submissive role as one standard component to serve for the whole urban system. The concept of objecthood in the city isolating the figure out of the context is actually closely focused around the topic of boundary. It is a similar concept of ‘Plinth’ from Pier Aureli’s book ‘The Possibility of An Absolute Architecture’. The ‘plinth’ of ‘absolute architecture’ corresponds very well with the characteristics of mini-malls which always have clearly defined boundaries. Both plinth and boundary explicitly describe the urban figures as unique objects with irreplaceable singularity and also generic urban units in the same way. The concept of boundary for mini-malls is a good lens as part of the architectural object. We look through it inside towards the architectural properties of each mini-mall with its special design story or social background. We can also look through it outside towards the whole urban surface, where the mini-malls play the identical role in the same system with gas stations, parking lot or typical LA apartments. From the boundary and objecthood of mini-malls, we can find another perspective to understand the Pier Aureli’s ‘Plinth’ and ‘Absolute Architecture’.

Hollywood

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Inside the clearly defined physical boundary of a parcel for mini-mall use, the building itself usually has the identical L-shape. In the perspective of rational urbanism, these L-shaped buildings are so resistent to change as a stubborn figure. On the other hand, in the perspective of objecthood, the normal L-Shape in the similar scale is a flexible typology which can be adapted into different specific conditions with infinite variations. Each variation is a unique shape for the object of mini-mall. It can be simply abstracted as a typological figure, but at the same time, it does create distinctive places successfully with diverse architectural morphologies. These morphological variations create intimate affect on people’s everyday life and correspond directly to the closest surrounding environment.

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Koreatown

Just as stated in the concept of objecthood, “the gestalt of objecthood necessitates that the only meaningful relationship is between the thing and the surrounding space. The viewer is made conscious that they are the critical factor in the situation; the objects relate to them and for them”. In different neighbourhood with different topographical or social environments, the mini-malls sharing the same L-Shaped design genes give their site-specific formal solutions directly meeting the demand of local people living nearby.

It is also a great answer to the question that, what is a successful role of the architecture design for contributing more as a powerful system to the non-stop city like Los Angeles? It has a lot of things worth of a discussion inside the ‘boundary’ of the mini-malls in terms of its morphological flexibility and identical L-shape typology.

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HOLLYWOOD

JEFFERSON

The objecthood of mini-malls is so special that the morphological singularity and its potential to be generic and identical coexist. The polarity and coexistence of these two features realize the spatial magic which makes it able to be reproduced endlessly in such a huge urban scale. In the description about ‘Flat Ontology’ in Ian Bogost’s book ‘Alien Phenomenology’,which says all the things in the world “equally exist yet … not exist equally”. Minimall is the perfect example to demonstrate this argument in a realistic way. They equally exist in the city as a generic typology, but not exist equally because each of them does have unique morphological adaptation to specific context.

Typical Mini-mall Billbaord

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KOREA TOWN

This special objecthood that is similar with ‘Flat Ontology’ can be understood through another concept, urban resolution. It is closely related to the dominance of car-driving experience in the city. Los Angeles doesn’t care about urban form at all and yields the most valuable street corners for void parking space of the mini-malls. This simple planning decision makes the whole city lose the opportunity to keep a continuous street facade, but create extreme convenience for drives to move smoothly into mini-malls. For most of the time when you drive fast in the city, you can only get the ‘identical’ impression of the mini-malls as resistant urban typology with generic features. That is a very low urban resolution because of the collective effect of speed, scale and visual sense. When you slow down, you get more details and more distinctions. Eventually after you stop driving and really get into it, every mini-mall becomes special as unique place. As a typological object, a mini-mall can be either a voiceless urban figure self-repeated in a blurred and ‘high-speed’ panorama, or a distinctive building with specific design attitudes in a high-res static image.

Different urban resolutions got from the driving experience provide us with a phenomenological background to think about the coexistence of uniqueness and identicality in the special objecthood of mini-malls.

Typical Mini-mall Billbaord

Another specific reason why the mini-malls in Los Angeles can be so morphologically flexible is due to the whole city’s ethnic diversity. Different ethnic communities would develop or transform the mini-malls with their own cultural influence. If we consider the decorations and billboards as another layer of the morphology or shape of mini-malls, the difference between a mini-mall in Koreatown and the one in little Armenia is even more huge and obvious.

The gap of economical conditions of different communities can be also reflected from the design of mini-malls. Most of the newly designed mini-malls are located in Hollywood or West Hollywood, but the ones on the west side of downtown Los Angeles are usually old and lack of good maintenance. According to the visual or literal information read from the form and billboards of different mini-malls, people can easily get enough feedback about the neighbourhood where they are. Interwoven by these multiple layers of cultural and social effects, the mini-malls correspond to the rich contextual information with a particular and unreproducible design solution. The uniqueness of the complex condition of each neighbourhood is the resource to endow the minimall objecthood with morphological diversity and flexibility

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Ecology 3: Planis of Id

Boundaryless Beyond the clearly defined boundary of each mini-mall, if we think about them as abstract urban figures again, the power of the mini-malls working together as an urbanistic mechanism is huge and essential for establishing the convenient life of whole Los Angeles. They are in fact ‘boundaryless’.

The mini-malls are geographically boundaryless and also psychologically boundaryless, just like the cognitive image of entire LA. The mapping drawing attached below shows how these generic models repeat in the boundaryless way. The whole mapping area includes a large carpet area from Hollywood to Jefferson indicating all the locations of the mini-malls in this area. They have identical features to each other like generic symbols pinned on the map. They are like ‘archipelagos’ in the endless ocean of urbanism described by Pier Aureli. These unstoppable urban objects are linked together as a cognitive network in people’s minds to navigate and enrich people’s urban experience. Sometimes people don’t need to rely too much on the map of iPhone and they just need to read the visual information from the mini-malls to understand where they are.

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Mini-mall’s and Urban Resolution

Mini-malls as Social Places

Mini-malls save the valuable walking experience and enrich people’s urban life by all senses, even on the spiritual level. If we compare the mini-malls in Los Angeles and the temples or shrines in Kyoto where the urbanistic smallness is historic and successful, quite a lot of similarities can be found between these two urban typologies with extremely different programs. In terms of the number in the city and the social role in the neighborhood, mini-malls are like the urban shrines in Los Angeles but just secularized by American commercial activities. In fact, there are some mini-malls parts of which are transformed into community Iglesias especially popular for the Latin American residents. Furthermore, you can also find schools or kindergartens redeveloped from an old mini-mall structure. This flexibility and adaptability into other programs beyond the limit of commercial use shows another way to look at mini-malls’ boundarylessness.

In the summer of 2014, a couple of comedians rent a shop at a typical mini-mall in Los Feliz and opened their own coffee shop named ‘Dumb Starbucks’, providing free coffee for people in the exactly same style of the giant chain coffee shop of Starbucks. Minutes after its open, ‘Dumb Starbucks’ got viral online very quickly and hundreds of people lined up in the mini-mall area waiting for free coffee with a lot of fun. It was a great parody show and actually one episode of the docu-reality comedy series ‘Nathan for You’. For this event, the mini-mall became a gallery-like place for performance art. The spatial flexibility and friendliness of mini-malls makes it happen as a successful social experiment attracting people to reflect our common daily life deeply influenced by big chain shop names and typical urban banalities and dumbness. That is quite an understandable reason that Starbucks didn’t pursue any legal actions on them.

Typical Mini-mall with Parking Lot A School Transformed from a Typical Mini-mall Structure

‘Dumb Starbucks’ at a Typical Mini-mall in Los Feliz

Existing Mini-mall Prototypes

Commercial Space

Parking Lots

New Mini-mall

Start-up Offices

Commercial Area

New Parking System

The design of the new mini-mall is based on the morphological analysis of the existing mini-mall typology which is normally composed by a L-shape single story or double story building and a parking lot. The new form of the mini-mall will consist of two L-shaped volumes, one of which is the regular office spaces and the other one is distorted and disformed to create a more dynamic commercial interface. The transformation of the parking system is also a key design element in the new minimall design. The orginal parking lot will be developed as a double-stroy 3D parking structure which uses the ground space and the roof space in the middle in a very efficient way.

Axonometric Drawing for the New Mini-mall

Mini-mallism The simple typology of mini-malls is actually a social complex. The boundary cuts the mini-mall out of the urban background as independent objects, and the boundarylessness realises a kind of ontological speculation of mini-malls in a broader view with its social, cultural and political implications. It can be related to the recently popular discussion about ‘Objects Oriented Ontology’ which critically rethinks the social meanings of architecture by arguing the architectural forms as unique and independent vehicles to reflect complex relationships. Through the concept of ‘Speculative Reality’ which is part of the philosophical foundation of OOO, mini-malls as independent objects are not isolated and enclosed environment at all, but a very open and complicated environment from where people can look into a lot of bigger issues, including the city spirit of Los Angeles, the social meaning of urban typologies and the everyday urbanism reflecting people’s true living conditions. Starting from its gestalt as urban figures in the perspective of objecthood, the discussion about these extracted mini-malls can lead into multiple directions. Just let’s see how many big words we have reached in former-mentioned texts: absolute architecture, figure-context relationship, objects oriented ontology and speculative reality. Objecthood is an intriguing threshold to focus on mini-malls.

The boundary is a clear lens to look into or out to the ontology of these urban objects. For the methodology, there are two main directions, one of which is to look upon it top-down on its physical conditions and abstract relationships to the city, the people and between one another. The other direction is to look into the mini-malls in the bottom-up way through the real experience of people’s bodies. These two methods work together to clearly articulate the role of mini-malls and the frantic mechanisms of the whole Los Angeles. Furthermore, the overlooked knowledge and underestimated meanings we’ve got from mini-malls would act in turn directly on the city’s future development with a better understanding about the urban objects and people’s social life relying on them.

Mini-mall is a typical representative of urban smallness, but it brings up a big and inclusive theory. It is Mini-mallism.

The design work for a new mini-mall shown here aims to focus on three issues. First of all, how to increase the density is the key problem for the next generation of mini-malls in Los Angeles. Even though the whole city is expanding itself unlimitedly, to maximize the density of a clearly framed commercial area, while still keeping the comfortable living method by driving, is also an important issue for Los Angeles. The interesting point of this is that Los Angeles never gives up his obsession with the horizontal ground and builds up a vertical urbanism easily. Los Angeles always tries to fold or squeeze its urban surface to accommodate more contents inside and still keeps the horizontality which has close relationship with the ground and automobile driving. This creates a kind of tension hidden under the urban form between the demand to increase urban density and the style to stay with endless flatness.

According to this outstanding characteristic of the city, the new mini-mall tries to distorts or bends the L-shaped figure three-dimensionally instead of stacking spaces vertically in order to increase the density in a traditional way. It is a mixed method to combine different ways to deform the original minimall morphology and attach new spatial elements onto it in the meantime. The general form of the new mini-mall still remains the original typology as an L shape, while the meticulously transformed structure is inserted with more contents beyond daily commercial activities in a higher density. The other thing whose density needs to be advanced is the parking space. The traditional parking method for mini-malls is to utilize the empty mini-plaza and it happens quite often that after passing through the plaza you fail to find any available spot. The new design cuts itself out for a road going to the roof level of the ground floor where there are more parking spots are located and this roof parking works together with the ground plaza as a 3D parking system.

It doesn’t only bring more parking spaces, but also increases the spatial interest for the building to integrate more practical utilizations. This brings more meaning for the new form which is a mixture of casual design gestures by cutting, stacking, bending and stretching.

In terms of the form, which is the second main issue the new design is focused on, we need to think about what is a good image for the typological object that can reproduce itself everywhere in the city. As stated before, the original L-shaped figure is a successful typology which is flexible to adapt into different neighbourhoods with unique design gestures. However, the design work for each mini-mall is still taking the form seriously as a ‘good-looking’ architecture that cares a lot about the formal concordance among different design elements. The new mini-mall should forget about the traditional architectural design thinking of the formal harmony or style. It should be a free and easy-going image which is more alike a casual collage painting reflecting the diversity and colorfulness of the contents inside the mini-malls. Therefore, the basic image of the new mini-mall’s form indicates honestly all the design gestures in a casual way. The general form doesn’t mind so much about the conflict between different geometries of spatial atmospheres. The influence of the original L-shaped geometry can be still captured and the contrast of rigid orthogonal space and the distorted interface is shown clearly.

It is a literal collage work of all activities going on inside the mini-mall. In this sense, the consideration about form and geometry becomes subordinate.

Logistics

Shop

Cafe

Community Library

Kitchen

Restaurant

Store

Store

Store

Shop

Shop Fashion Store

Fastfood Shop

Ground Floor Plan

Roof Parking

Logistics

Library Cafe

Shop

Shop

Shop

Office

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Multi-funtion

2nd Floor Plan

Janitor Office

Office

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Office

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Restaurant

3rd Floor Plan

The third main design intents is to create an inner alley on the back side of the new mini-mall. This is aimed at to recover what is missing in the urban experience in Los Angeles. The formless of the whole city and the absolute dominance of car-drivings makes it lack of continuous street interface and interesting street life. For most buildings in Los Angeles, they have a clear front side facing to the parking lot and a back side which is totally negative with nothing to explore. Between buildings there are usually just busy car traffic or another parking lot. This makes sense for Los Angeles to keep the smooth movement by car as the absolute priority for the entire urban design. However, it is still an intriguing urban experiment to re-generate an introverted, pedestrian and narrow alley spaces to bring back the traditional street life with an intimate scale. The minimalls provide great opportunities to be inserted with the newly-created alleys.

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Section 1

The re-generated alley space is inserted at the north side of the mini-mall where is usaully designed as a partition wall with the adjacent parcel. The new mini-mall design yields a narrow and curve linear space from which people get access to a series of small-scaled shops, restaurants or other recreational spaces. This intimate alley space would attract more people to walk through the back side and make the original dead wall alive with vivid street life.

Working together with the front plaza and the pedestrian system around it, the back alley is part of a pedestrian circulation loop passing through the whole structure and integrating all the activities tightly in a continuous way. From the newly created alley space, people in Los Angeles can enjoy the colorful small urbanity with diverse and intimate experience again.

The hidden and introverted atmosphere around it renders this small linear space even more tempting for people who pause the driving and want to explore another version of Los Angeles life by all senses of the body.

In general, all sides of the new mini-mall have active dialogues with the urban context around it. There is no negative-positive bifurcation of the mini-mall interfaces, but the distinction between different sides’ atmospheric characteristics is still sharp. The new mini-mall provides people with more opportunities to explore more ‘sides’ of Los Angeles. Through the new mini-mall, Los Angeles is not only a flat city designed for automobiles, it can be also experienced as a human-scaled city with various urban smallness.

Through the series of sections drawing, a wide range of spatial differences is shown clearly that different sized or shaped rooms correspond to different programs. This variety of different rooms meeting people’s different demands are linked together by a 3D circulation system consisting of the typical outdoor mini-mall stairs and newly inserted vertical traffic cores. In the meantime, from the east to west, a gradience of the spatial change can be seen through the series section drawings. The regular L-shaped volume on the east gradually transforms into a more casual and diverse form which is more developed as public use. The ramp for cars going to the roof parking cuts through the building volume and creates another interstitial space as storage or other logistical use. The ramp in the middle doesn’t separate the rooms, but integrate different programs in a more diverse way. It is actually an exciting moment to see the car circulation is infused into the architecture geometry as an organising control line.

Section E

Section D

Section C

Section B

Section A

Looking Up Axonometric Drawing

The Roof

The New Alley

The Main Mini-mall

Street View

Therefore, the new mini-mall as the typological urban object in the city is not a single icon any more, it is a multi-layered system integrating conventional mini-mall shopping, unconventional alley street life and three-dimensional parking together. From the avenue side, the image of this new mini-mall is a diverse collage painting representing the open and colorful spirit of the whole Los Angeles. It is a small mirror reflecting the city’s ethnic diversity, high mixture of heterogeneous urban programs, and smooth traffic connection by automobiles. The network of the new mini-malls will still work as one of the elemental objects of the city, shaping people’s new way of navigation in the city both physically and cognitively.

The design work for the new mini-mall starts as an isolated object which exists out of a specific context but within an abstract frame. Endowed with the uniqueness and singularity through the design work as an independent object, the new mini-mall is re-entangled into the city as a generic urban figure. In the same dialogue about ‘objecthood’ discussed at the beginning, this cutting-out /entangling-in process specifically answers the question why the mini-malls are so typical and successful for the city of Los Angeles.

West Street View

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North Elevation

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West Elevation

The simple typology of mini-malls is actually a social complex.

The boundary cuts the mini-mall out of the urban background as independent objects, and the boundarylessness realises a kind of ontological speculation of mini-malls in a broader view with its social, cultural and political implications. It can be related to the recently popular discussion about ‘Objects Oriented Ontology’ which critically rethinks the social meanings of architecture by arguing the architectural forms as unique and independent vehicles to reflect complex relationships. Through the concept of ‘Speculative Reality’ which is part of the philosophical foundation of OOO, mini-malls as independent objects are not isolated and enclosed environment at all, but a very open and complicated environment from where people can look into a lot of bigger issues, including the city spirit of Los Angeles, the social meaning of urban typologies and the everyday urbanism reflecting people’s true living conditions. Starting from its gestalt as urban figures in the perspective of objecthood, the discussion about these extracted mini-malls can lead into multiple directions. Just let’s see how many big words we have reached in former-mentioned texts: absolute architecture, figure-context relationship, objects oriented ontology and speculative reality. Objecthood is an intriguing threshold to focus on mini-malls. The boundary is a clear lens to look into or out to the ontology of these urban objects. For the methodology, there are two main directions, one of which is to look upon it top-down on its physical conditions and abstract relationships to the city, the people and between one another. The other direction is to look into the mini-malls in the bottom-up way through the real experience of people’s bodies. These two methods work together to clearly articulate the role of mini-malls and the frantic mechanisms of the whole Los Angeles. Furthermore, the overlooked knowledge and underestimated meanings we’ve got from mini-malls would act in turn directly on the city’s future development with a better understanding about the urban objects and people’s social life relying on them.

Mini-mall is a typical representative of urban smallness, but it brings up a big and inclusive theory. It is Mini-mallism.

Tianci Han