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Shopping Centers Today -> May 2002
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SCARCE, EXPENSIVE SITES DRIVE DEVELOPERS SKYWARD
Trying to find a mall in Taiwan? You might consider looking upward, because most of the country’s downtown malls extend well above ground level. Thus far the record is held by Core Pacific City, Taipei, which is 19 stories high and will eventually have more than 1,000 stores; six of its floors will be open 24 hours a day. Taichung Central Mall, Taichung, opened in September with 118,500 square meters (1.3 million square feet) of retail on 17 levels, and FE21 Mega, an extended department store center in Kaohsiung that launched in October, has 18 stories. While these are all regional-size malls, small can also be tall: Future Center, a 162,000-square-foot center that opened in Taipei in December, has 13 stories.
This verticality is the result of high land costs in Taiwan, but it brings its own unique set of challenges. High-rise buildings typically take longer to construct and require good fire escape routes and efficient elevator/escalator circulation of shoppers from one level to the next. It is also necessary to let shoppers know what is offered on different floors and to entice them to visit even the highest levels. Dream Mall, a 2.5 million-square-foot, 11-level center now under construction in Kaohsiung, will have an entertainment zone with restaurants and a multiplex movie theater on the upper stories and a Ferris wheel on the roof. FE21 has a food court, a large format Eslite bookstore (a Taiwanese brand) and a café on its top floor, and they are heavily visited destinations.
The strategy is to get people up high first so that they can come down through the other floors of retail, explained Jean-Louis Bourgier, vice president of operations at Far Eastern Department Stores, Taipei, which owns FE 21. He noted that the Taiwanese are accustomed to verticality.
“It’s not a problem; people are used to going up,” he said. “Any department store in Taiwan has from seven to 11 stories.”
Helping people find where they want to go is another imperative. Vertical shopping centers are organized much like department stores, with different merchandise categories or price points on different floors. Dream Mall aims to meet all the shopping needs of different customer markets; its offerings will range from a Carrefour hypermarket and home furnishings outlet in the basement to two designer-label fashion floors with valet parking and a customer waiting lounge; Sogo and Daimaru department stores will also anchor the center. Design features give each floor a specific identity, said Jay Clark, vice-president-in-charge for Baltimore-based RTKL Associates, the project’s designers and architects.
“You have to make the layers different,” Clark said. “In design terms, it’s a challenge to keep it interesting all the way through.”
Color-theming and different building materials (white marble on the higher-end merchandise floors, for example) help shoppers get their bearings. At the same time, floors are linked by a large atrium in the center, and plazas at the corner of each floor have different graphic features and entry monuments. Visitors can have very different experiences at the mall, according to their different shopping objectives, Clark said.
— S.T.
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