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Shopping Centers Today -> December 2001
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MALL MAESTROS
As projects get more complex, so do architects’ roles
By Debra Hazel
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| CocoWalk, Miami (top), and Expo X-Plore, Durban, South Africa: not your father’s vanilla boxes. |
From czar to conductor, perhaps even to sound mixer: The role of the architect in shopping center development has shifted from total dictatorship of a project’s appearance to that of coordinating massive numbers of specialists to achieve a successful and unified look.
In doing so, shopping center designers find themselves in a variety of new roles: historians, cheerleaders, project managers. And the creation of a successful project may require a designer who isn’t even an architect.
“The architect as we know it today will most likely cease to exist,” said Roy Higgs, CEO of Development Design Group, Baltimore. Higgs himself is an industrial designer, not an architect.
The reason is simple: Customers and developers no longer are satisfied by, or even want, the gray fortress-type malls that were prevalent into the 1980s.
“Malls 10 years ago were designed with the same kind of look,” noted J. Thomas Porter, partner of Thompson Ventulett Stainback & Associates, Atlanta. “You could go from Boston to anywhere and they’d look the same.”
In the last five years, that attitude has changed. As shopping centers have started including nonretail tenants such as sports facilities, theaters and gardens, catering to customers who have more choices as to where they shop, developers want their centers to be more entertaining in themselves. Shoppers also have made it clear that they want their malls and town centers to blend with and reflect their own communities.
As a result, what had been fairly basic elements in a design, such as lighting, seating and use of color, are now more complex, requiring the use of experts in landscaping, lighting, design, typeface, acoustics, interior decorating and even history, to achieve the desired results. To satisfy those needs, design firms are looking all over the world for talent from various fields, including industrial design. They also are bringing in outside consultants earlier in the design process than ever before.
“They want to provide as many services as possible to their clients and are calling us earlier,” said Dean Pritchard, president of WLS Lighting Services, Fort Worth, Texas. “I prefer it; it makes it easier to work.”
In addition, interior designers are having a great influence on the look of retail centers, particularly in how architects view color. Thus, other designers find that not even the conductor analogy describes their role.
“We find ourselves in the role of composer, not the conductor,” said Eric Kuhne, principal of Eric Kuhne & Associates, London. “But many times, the composer has to get on the stand and rewrite. You have to balance so that no section plays louder.” Kuhne utilized 500 separate professionals to create the overall design for the much-acclaimed 1.7 million-square-foot Bluewater mall in Dartford, Kent.
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CenterBuild
Architects, designers, builders, engineers and others engaged in retail construction will be gathering Dec. 5 through Dec. 8 for the CenterBuild Conference in Scottsdale, Ariz. For more details, please visit ICSC’s Web site at www.icsc.org. |
The architect also must coordinate the look of the tenants, particularly in the open-air town center projects so popular today. Store design has changed radically in the past 10 years, and shopping center designers must accommodate it.
“You will have to adjust to a particular tenant. That never happened before. You now have awnings, fenestration, canopies to deal with,” Higgs said. “It’s a cacophony of events and things an architect cannot possibly deal with.”
These changes are the result of a massive shift in thinking by shopping center developers.
“Ten years ago, all [developers] cared about was the transaction. But it’s never been about the transaction; it’s about the experience,” Kuhne said.
Among retail developers, perhaps the most dramatic change has taken place at Taubman Centers, Bloomfield Hills, Mich. The company once specialized in well-built, but standard, vanilla boxes that showcased retailer storefronts rather than called attention to the malls themselves. More recently, Taubman has turned to much more elaborate designs.
“Shopping centers and retail are evolving now,” said Carl Hagleman, senior vice president of planning and design for Taubman Centers. “In the 1960s and 1970s they were designed to be rational and efficient machines for shopping.”
But as time passed, and customers grew more sophisticated, they expected more than just a retail-processing machine; they wanted experiences, preferably those linked in some way to their community.
Taubman has now added what Hagleman calls three more “overlays” to its traditional requirement of quality product and open floor plan: a sense of place; an engaging atmosphere, including comfortable seating and dramatic lighting; and complementary architecture that will become part of a center’s overall environment.
“We want a vision for every center that appeals to the local community,” Hagleman said.
Kuhne
takes the vision a step further: Centers should tell a story to
and about the community. His work at Touchwood shopping center in
Solihull, England, reflects the experience of growing up in the
British Midlands, while Bluewater’s elements recall the local
hop-growing agriculture in the surrounding Kent countryside.
But the need for additional experts leads to two basic questions: Who makes the final decisions? And after that, who makes sure they’re implemented?
Ultimately, the architect has to fulfill the needs and desires of the developer client; the final design decisions usually are a compromise between the two.
“It means interacting with the designers more and allowing them to interpret the overlays with the shopping center design,” Hagleman said.
Implementation of those decisions varies: Some architects prefer to serve as the central coordinators of the consultants, while others leave much of the implementation of final decisions to project managers.
Higgs is quick to note that some architects, such as Frank Gehry, continue to totally dominate the design process, but they are quickly becoming the exception rather than the rule. Yet the awareness of the importance of architecture, helped by such high-profile designers as Gehry, has helped retail designers promote their ideas.
“Without question, design has become a much more saleable commodity,” Higgs said.
Getting different points of view, from associates of various backgrounds as well as consultants, developers and tenants, may complicate the design process and compel architects to learn skills far beyond their original training. But it’s the only way, say today’s retail designers, to make a successful shopping center.
“I don’t think we have a choice,” Kuhne said. “One thing about a consumer society is that it constantly redefines experience and quality.”
 | Current Issue November 2008 |