ICSC Future Image Architecture Competition

The fabric of nearly every city in America, large or small, is shaped to varying degrees by the checkerboard pattern of Big Box and strip development. As millions of square feet of abandoned Big Box stores now sit silent on acres of asphalt in many cities across our country, the problem of rethinking these sites transcends that of merely responding to shifting retail trends and must now address larger cultural social, and environmental issues as well...
Tomorrow's Big Box stores must generate more than sales. They must form an authentic community in a way that celebrates individuals' lives holistically... in a way that engages how we Live, Love, and Learn.

Reconsider an underperforming retail center, and the potential it has to bring meaning, value and purpose to the community it serves.

The design team has chosen one specific TYPE of site to exemplify the opportunities intrinsic to large retail centers that are no longer bringing adequate return to the landowners, tenants, and most importantly, the public. As the suburbs of yesterday are emerging as urban cores of tomorrow, the value and potential for the adaptive re-use of large retail sites is unprecedented. re is a blueprint for redeveloping a retail site ANYWHERE by introducing new uses that consider a fresh set of priorities, principles, and objectives to catalyze positive change for the local community.

reSTART: a big box as a blank slate
Typical of most big boxes and shopping centers, a large structure is set within a field of valuable real estate and coated in a sea of asphalt. Consider the box as a solid blank slate which can be carved and opened in countless ways to form an urban landscape comprised of a multitude of uses, connected by open air pedestrian streets and public courtyards. Integrating these new paths beyond the footprint of the box can inform other moves on the site, as the extents of the old box are blurred into the new landscape of the site.

reCONNECT: establish a physical and emotional connection to the surrounding community
Most commonly, the large format retail center sits as an isolated destination, detached from the community, and accessed almost solely by an automobile. As density and activity of the surrounding area increases, often the connections are still dominated by the automobile. Just as the extents of the box are blurred into the redeveloped site, opportunities exist to weave the edges of the site into the surrounding physical context. Taking cues from districts in the established urban core, make connections that link the parcel to existing roads, pedestrian/bicycle paths, transit, and adjacent neighborhoods.

reVIVE: instill with life and energy
Transform the underperforming site into a vibrant place where people live, work, play, eat, and shop. Much like a traditional city, the re-envisioned site features a mosaic of uses and activities, enabled by individual parcels within the greater site.

reTURN: cultivate the natural landscape
Between adding structured parking to the retail box, and reevaluating the amount of on-site parking, asphalt is transformed into open fields, farmland, watercourses, and places which function in sync with the rhythms of the natural world.

reCLAIM: engage the community
As new retail is integrated with other components such as housing, live/work space, community center, library, farmer?s market, amphitheatre, and restaurants, the site naturally becomes a place of greater relevance to people?s lives, and more deeply informs the surrounding areas.

reENVISION: imagine a sustainable future
From re-purposing the existing retail box, and restoring natural habitat, to implementing strategies which make this development a net contributor of energy, a precedent is established which recognizes our delicate balance with nature.

SHOPPING REDUX (or Under New Management)
More buildings than ever before surround us, yet we have to question the types of environments we, as designers, builders, and developers, are creating. Landscapes of shopping are often the most vital piece of a city’s public realm — a barometer of the larger health and quality of life of a place. All too often, shopping environments exist as mono-functioning, disconnected fragments within the larger city. They are collections of retail buildings surrounded by seas of parking and lanes of interstate highway. BIG BOX/ MEGA PROJECT is a proposal for a more cohesive and integrated retail vision.

SHOPPING AS INFRASTRUCTURE (or The World is a Mall)
What if shopping were a conduit within an urban environment? What if systems of public space, residential, commercial, and retail development were woven together to create a dense and active urban core? This is a proposal for a mixed-use shopping district, a plug-in piece for an existing city.

THE SCALE OF SHOPPING (or From the Kiosk to the Warehouse)
The success of BIG BOX / MEGA PROJECT lies within spatial relationships and program adjacencies. Overlaps in program produce spaces of multiple scales, function, and elevation. This new landscape mixes small and large-scale program — from the bike rack to the big box building. It combines activities of daily, periodic, and episodic frequency to sustain a continual, varied, and rich sequence of use. Public amenities, including a library, museum, and amphitheatre “seed” the development and act as crescendos along the undulating public path. Naturally, the infrastructural approach enables the integration of public transit and sustainable systems.

THE ANTI PLAN (or Mix and Match)
Rather than prescribe precise programmatic certainties, this proposal is a framework for growth over time. ‘Zones of opportunity’ allow for a continuous and flexible adaptive-re-use of existing program as well as incremental expansion.

TWO BOXES ARE BETTER THAN ONE: THE BUDDY SYSTEM It is now evident that there are many underperforming and dead shopping centers that are valuable assets waiting for reinvestment and a re-genesis. Old models will no longer work in a world that now requires innovation. These renewed properties will have a much more diverse mix of uses, similar to evolved urban centers. To endure they will have to become completed integrated into the city, physically and programmatically. So, the key questions are ‘how do we begin’ and ‘what can effectively be done with the least amount of capital investment’ and finally, ‘How can it be phased’? We have the answer and the cure. Resurrect the boxes in pairs. We are proposing a social model as a metaphor for a business.

CIB = COMMUNITY INTERACTION BOX

In the future, the inventory-obsessed, shelf-rack retail paradigm is rendered obsolete by a resurgence in direct, local retail coupled with the low-cost, ubiquity of online shopping and digital culture. Aware of their access to global and local retail markets, future shoppers are jaded by but tied to the vicissitudes of digital culture, dedicated to the healthy, environmental impact of their purchases, and in need of a new, socially-interactive retail paradigms focused on local scale but aware of global opportunities. In this context, the Community Interaction Box converts the traditional big-box anchor into a tech-savvy, cooperative marketplace offering the shopping center consumer a place to engage retail “pop-up tenants”, community based barter and DIY (do it yourself) forums, farmers markets, local artists/craftspeople gallery booths and co-ops, public meeting spaces, and shared production spaces.

The future shopper yearns for healthful community engagement within their digitally infused retail experience.

Reduced to only its necessary structural and protective elements, the former big-box shell is converted into a giant, high-tech, digitally interactive media armature with a transparent but breathable envelope. Outside, the C.I.B. shell is subservient to its role as interactive message board. Inside, the C.I.B. unites a warmer and more comforting marketplace amidst lush, soft, and comfortable interior spaces punctuated by interior gardens, intermittent atria and courts open to the sky. At the heart of the C.I.B., the developer operates the cooperative space, sub-leasing to the community oriented mixture of temporary and semi-permanent tenants—even to public entities or agencies in need of semi-permanent or low-cost space—as well as unites the tenants with a public space called AV_TAR. The AV-TAR plaza offers visitors a digital passport service or a completely customizable and scalable, digital “second self” —complete with full scale body mapping or VR visualization if desired—with which to test, research, and purchase not only retail or fashion products but also a plethora of services and social networking, digital media, and interactive environments. Including a mapping center, visualization / customization stations, a café, and multiple age-appropriate playgrounds, the AV_TAR venue makes it possible to “log-in” to the C.I.B. as a community member and also as a global digital shopper. AV_TAR customers select from the menu of “digital passport” options to document their preferences and sizes, store profile information and interests, link them to local and global retailers, and help them make use of the various current and future C.I.B. events and tenants. The AV-TAR studio is a way of also giving an online, do-it-yourself flea market/barter market venue a physical loci.

Networked, digitally infused by the AV_TAR plaza—the CIB converts the complication, lack of trust, and absence of engagement in online shopping; linking it to our increased desire to engage people and communities in social and supportive, quasi-civic environments. The CIB re-links individuals, families, retailers, artists, and craftspeople of all shapes and sizes within the context of a transitional retail experience easily adapting to specific contexts to become a largely local phenomena with a global presence.