The Daily Mall Reader: Mall Makeovers
A daily dose of mall-related reading...
(Excerpt) When they first walked into Montgomery Mall in 1989, architects saw a worn, dark, 22-year-old building, as fixed in time as a hippie wearing bell-bottoms.Drywall, cheap and bland, was all around. The floor was laid with dark paving tiles. The high ceilings receded into blackness at night. Everywhere was dark oak -- benches, handrails, trim -- the color of oak one might associate with a turn-of-the-century schoolhouse or an old town hall.
Two years later, after the architects from RTKL in Baltimore were done, high-buff marble floors shone underfoot. Glittering brass handrails picked up the shimmer. There was glass everywhere. Lights were thrown up to the ceiling at night, emphasizing, rather than trying to hide, the spacious interior.
Like movie stars trying to keep their youthful looks, Montgomery Mall had gotten a face lift, a change in architecture inside and out. These make-overs usually happen about once a decade.
Read the full article here.
posted by Keith @ 3/07/2007
3 Comments:
You should see what they've done to the Westgate Village Shopping Center down here in Toledo. Already I'm pissed a little with he newbie buildings they had to stick up.
Tyson's Corner Center (a/k/a Tyson's I) is a really beautiful mall, and a definate favorite. While it is very modern in it's interior, it works, and the variety of stores makes up for any over-the-top modern design.
Tyson's II is way too upscale for my taste, but the interior is gorgeous. I'm not a fan, however, of the new exterior. We recently stayed in a hotel across the street from it and got to view it extensively through our window, and the fakey street storefront thing is too cutesy, and really doesn't accomplish what I think they want to accomplish. It still screams high-end snooty shopping.
Unfortunately, the Lehigh Valley Mall and Harrisburg Mall are slated to adopt the fake-street-of-high-end-stores mentality too.
I agree with Cora. I would definately prefer shopping in a time warp then shopping in crappy pastel colors and a lighter more "modern" look. What people don't get is is that the groovyness of the 50s, 60s and 70s is MODERN!
Even in Chicago, with it's history of architecture has a crappy way of preserving it at times. Most well known works don't get touched it's the obscure ones that may suffer. I was reading in the paper the other day about some art deco building downtown that a developer wants to replace with condos. The landmark people approved the removing of the facade, the demolishing of the orginal structure only to put the beautiful facade on a new cheap Home Depot bricked building. WTF? How is that preserving the landmark if the essentialness of the orginal is gone?
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