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Shopping Centers Today -> January 2001
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Artful gallery
New look for downtown Philadelphia's largest center
By Kimberly Pfaff
 The Gallery at Market East features colorful sculptures highlighting Philadelphia's local legends. |
"We're in such a strategic location, we have 40,000 people of all types coming through each day—city residents, office workers, conventioneers and tourists," said Larry Howard, vice president and general manager of Gallery One.
Yet the center, built in 1977, was clearly showing signs of age. And while many Philadelphians were commuting through the mall, they weren't necessarily stopping to shop.
The question, then, was how could the property be updated without undergoing a full-scale remodeling? As if the mall's size weren't daunting enough, the Gallery's intricate ownership and management structure was especially complex. The center is divided into Gallery One and Two, with separate owners and management for each.
The Rouse Co., Columbia, Md., for example, has a long-term lease for Gallery One. Gallery Two, meanwhile, is owned by a pension fund, the Public School Employees Retirement System, represented by Dallas-based L&B Group. Gallery Two is managed by Metro Commercial Management Services. In addition, the center's common area is owned by the city of Philadelphia Redevelopment Authority, and overseen by the Mall Maintenance Corp.
"This was the most complex renovation that I ever encountered, because of all the various owners and management groups," said Rocky Goins, director of capital projects for The Rouse Co., which headed up the Gallery renovation.
To tackle the project, The Rouse Co. enlisted the joint talents of St. Louis-based Kiku Obata & Co., a multidisciplinary design firm, and Cope Linder Associates, a Philadelphia-based architectural firm. The solution was to phase in different stages of strategic renovations over several years, by focusing on key elements such as graphics, signage, tile and lighting, rather than embarking on a full-scale structural overhaul.
"The existing facility has a lot of painted metal column covers and metal ceilings, and it's a very expensive material to replace in that much area," explained David Ertz, a partner with Cope Linder Associates. "We decided to leave that as a neutral backdrop.
"In a lot of mall renovations," he added, "you end up replacing the columns and doing a lot of structural work, but the common area here is just too vast. We decided that focusing on certain areas of the floor, and on the graphics, would be a quick, novel way to bring light and color into the mall."
 Floors around The Gallery at Market East's directories have been retiled using bold colors. |
To liven up the mall's outdated directories, Kiku Obata & Co. developed a "Street Expressions" graphics program. The idea was to top the directories with colorful, sculptural designs highlighting local legends, landmarks and Philly's favorite sons and daughters, to create an engaging, yet functional, visual element. In total, the project features 44 subjects drawn by 17 different illustrators, and crafted from a variety of materials including aluminum, Sintra, PVC, neon, durable foam and colored acrylic.
"We wanted to do something that focused on the user, which was Philadelphians,"
said Kiku Obata, principal of the design firm.
"We
decided to feature famous Philadelphians in a whimsical way, and created
them in a lot of different styles, almost as a work of graffiti. It has
a layered, urban feel, but it also celebrates the famous people from this
city. We wanted the citizens of Philadelphia to be proud of their diverse
heritage."
And diverse that heritage certainly is, judging from the new tower directories, which feature engaging, cartoon-like renditions of such notables as Billie Holiday, Edgar Allen Poe, Walt Whitman, John Coltrane, Joe Frazier, Bill Cosby and Benjamin Franklin.
Once the actual concept for the project was decided upon, the real challenge turned out to be obtaining permission from all of the personalities that Kiku Obata wanted to portray.
"We had to get a separate firm involved to help us secure all the rights," noted Obata. "That took about six months."
The end result is a series of bright, sculptural structures that sit atop the mall directories. The main tower directory, at 40 feet tall, dominates the mall's center court area; there are also two 16-foot-tall structures, and several smaller ones.
"Our objective was to create a dynamic showpiece at the property that would lure shoppers in, and be interesting for tourists and locals alike," Obata said. "What's unique about this directory is that it's a marketing event."
And, he noted, the fluid nature of the directories' design also creates some interesting promotional opportunities for the future.
"It's designed so that we can continue to add personalities down the road," Goins related. "We have some generic personalities that we could switch out to add someone specific to the directory. We could have that person come in and hold an unveiling of their new graphic, whether it's for an orchestra leader, a sports figure, a singer, etc. So, throughout the life of the property, there are multiple opportunities for promotional events."
At the same time, Kiku Obata & Co. also updated the area's signage. "This is a very active mall because it has a transit commuter station beneath," noted Obata, "so part of our charge was to create something enticing, to get people upstairs to shop, and part of the program was identifying the transit station and helping people to get around."
To coordinate with the graphics and add more energy to the interior, Cope Linder retiled the floor area surrounding the directories using geometric designs rendered in bold, custom colors. "We really saw the floor as an extension of the colorful graphics of the directories," related Ertz.
"We wanted to do something you wouldn't find in a traditional suburban mall, where the colors are typically very subdued. We felt that because this is an urban mall, it should have an urban vitality to it."
The final Phase I improvement was to improve the lighting. In the common area, Cope Linder replaced the old incandescent fixtures with new halide lights for a brighter, cleaner illumination and a more decorative effect. The firm then boosted the light level in the feature areas and on the directories themselves using high-performance floodlighting.
The total Phase I renovation came to just over $2 million. This month, Cope Linder will address a complete retiling of the entire center. Additional updating scheduled over the next few years will include upgrades to the mall's fountains, entrances and exterior.
So far, consumers seem to like the changes. "We don't have a study on the impact, but we've gotten lots of favorable comments from customers, in that now they can walk up to a directory and it's practical; the old ones were outdated and confusing," said Gallery One's Howard. " The center is also much brighter, and has a warmer, more comfortable feel with the lighting.
"And at any given time," he added, "you can see tourists stopping in front of the directories and taking pictures."
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