Shopping Centre Architecture
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With a recent flurry of major shopping centres under-construction or nearing completion around Ireland – I believe it interesting to note what constitutes good design to these mammoth-size structures that can so very often dominate the architectural and economic landscape of its immediate area – and in some cases, beyond. It is only correct that we become ever more demanding on the aesthetical qualities of these giant structures and be weary of falling into the trap which has fated so many Continental European, UK and American cities and towns – that is, the draining of life from city/town centres. So what is the recent standard of shopping developments in Ireland?
The most notable retail centre developments in Ireland as of the present include the massive projects by Castlethorn Construction at Dundrum in Dublin, Treasury Holdings at Ballymun in Dublin, O’Callaghan Properties/DEKA at Mahon Point in Cork, O’Flynn Construction at Ballincollig in Cork, Edward Holdings’ Scotch Hall development and Newbridge Investments’ Whitewater Centre in Newbridge, Kildare. These are but among a few – in addition to the huge centres already in place at Blanchardstown, Liffey Valley, Jervis Street, Swords, Merchants Quay (Cork), Wilton (Cork) and so on. But that’s not all, more centres are planned or in planning for Dun Laoighre (Dublin), Douglas (Cork), Carrigaline (Cork), Academy Street (Cork) and Sligo Town Centre.
Below are some images of the above aforementioned. Weighing up – it is interesting to assess scale and deisgn. They may not always be pretty but here they are.
Dundrum Town Centre (Burke Kennedy Doyle)
Mahon Point Shopping Centre (Dirk Luow, Project Architects)
Douglas Central Shopping Centre (Wilson Architecture)
Ballincollig Town Centre (Wilson Architecture/Reddy O’Riordan Staehli)
Scotch Hall (Douglas Wallace)
Ballymun Shopping Centre (Building Design Partnership)any pics of the prososal for stillorgan? i’ve seen a brochure on it but it never occured to me to scan it.
@lexington wrote:
It is only correct that we become ever more demanding on the aesthetical qualities of these giant structures.
I prefer the older Stillorgan centre to the likes of Blanch and Quarryvale. Albeit surrounded by acres of surface parking, at least Stillorgan is a rough facsimile of real shopping streets in a town. You can stroll around in the sun on a good day or shelter beneath the covered walkways if it rains. The newer places seem like giant boxes with huge high white windowless corridors horribly lit. The musak echoes around the miserable shoppers. I won’t go these places when I can shop in town or in Dunlaoghaire or stillorgan and breathe fresh air.
“Dundrum Town Centre” What a scam! There’s already a town centre with some pretty buildings and beside it a grey slum shopping centre. So they build a new SC up the road in the new windowless prison style and call it Dundrum Town Centre – a desperate attempt to endow a soulless box of chainstores shops with a sense of place.
Of course private opwnership is the key difference between a shopping centre and a real shopping district. If you’re too old, too young or too poor to look like a customer, the management can kick you out.
Has anyone considered making residential floors over shopping centres? It might humanise them.
My understanding is that Castlethorn Construction are to utilise the older centre as part of its overall ‘town centre’ plan. In which format I am as yet unsure.
I heard some vague details about the plan for the old dundrum sc about a year ago. The old centre was to be pulled down and replaced with more shops, department stores, offices, a hotel, a small number of apartments and what was described as a “covered civic square”. A pedestrian walkway linked the development to the new dundrum town centre. I never saw any renderings or detailed plans though. Last i heard the hotel had been dropped from the proposal.
A mate of mine in Benoy’s in England worked on Newbridge – there’s some great CGI’s at http://www.henryjlyons.com. Retail section. there’s also some good images of Ballymun
@KarenS wrote:
Has anyone considered making residential floors over shopping centres? It might humanise them.
The Whitewater Shopping Centre Development in Newbridge includes 84 apartments along with a 6 screen Cineplex, commercial office space, in addition to the 50 or so retail units, although I think the developers at one stage wanted to omitt the 6 screen Cineplex element of the project, and replace it with office space but the Planning Authority took a different view on that matter.
Architects for the project are Henry J. Lyons & Partners.
burge_eye looks like you got in while I was preparing the post on that one.
I understand that there was some complex fire engineering solutions employed in the design of that project which greately reduced the cost of construction.I prefer the older Stillorgan centre to the likes of Blanch and Quarryvale.
Just as a way, to support that form of argument, I would like to add I definitely think, there is a need to support diversity, in the range of solutions available to shopping centre development consortiums, rather than carrying the same solution around with them underneath their arms,… which results in a kind of biosphere culture creation all over the globe. There may be critics of the old Stillorgan shopping centre design, the open air walk routes, and some valid criticism too perhaps, but at least, it isn’t just yet another re-hashing of bio-spherism models. Which was all that basically got thrown together by DMOD there recently, and would be a step backwards for that site, rather than one in the forward direction.
Took this nice piece of writing from a book today, about the world’s largest shopping centre in Minnesota in the United States, same place where Fargo the movie was set, snowed in, for eight months of the year, so people literally exist inside these biospheres for that 8 months. 🙁
During my first trip to the Mall of America, I didn’t even make it halfway around the mall’s perimeter. My legs got tired and I had to stop. I remember sitting at a table in a food court, eating a Dagwood and wondering if I would be able to muster the energy to make it back to my car. As I languished in the food court, I absentmindedly watched a regiment of mothers patrol the walkways with their strollers. It was a Monday, and the soccer moms were out in numbers: youthful, pretty mothers, glowing with vitality and wheeling around their offspring to the cadence of some imaginary drill instructor.
There were so many stores. As in any large biosphere, specialisation was a necessity. There even one store that just carried magnets. All they sold were these little refrigerator magnets, thousands of them, stuck to the store’s walls. As I passed by, I saw that the cashier was reading a Stephen King paperback and looked bored out of her mind. She was like an inmate at Alcatraz, doing hard time and trying her best to burn away the hours of tedium.
The underlying theme here I think is basic human greed, the same for thousands of years really, and the Architects have their fair share of blame here too I suspect. One basic question to ask would be how much energy is guzzled up by these brand new biospherical public buildings? The single biggest sector of energy usage in Europe is, you’ve guessed it: buildings. Running 160 million buildings in Western Europe alone, uses over 40% of Europes total energy consumption. 40% plus of carbon dioxide emissions come from buildings. Only 31% CO2 currently comes from transport! But then again, a commision to build a shopping centre extension, can keep a small Arch practice ticking over for 12 months plus. That is good money in anyones’ language.
The current plan is to reduce the carbon dioxide emissions in Western Europe by as much as 45 million tonnes by 2010. This is where the current situation gets a little bit tricky for planting those nice shiny new Biospherical developments everywhere IMHO. Unless you totally want to stick your head in the sand, and completely ignore the energy conservation brief. In Europe, as part of the goal to reduce CO2 emissions, all new Buildings over 1000m2 buildings will need to state their energy saving criteria, as part of their conceptual design. I can only presume this is why Bolton Street/UCD/Queens now have their Architectural students drawing trendy little green and red ‘air-flow’ arrows all over the place. 🙂 Is it a sign I am old when I get nostalgic for the old days, when a drawing a few fire escape route arrows was considered cutting edge?
Even though, Residential Buildings still manage to go through a whopping 2/3’s of the energy consumption from that 40% total buildings now use. The service industry’s growth in Europe, means, that things like Biospheres are catching up rapidly. As the Commercial sector is growing, it just demands more and more energy, fact. Compared to older and currently more unpopular models, like the old shopping centre in Stillorgan and similar examples scattered around Ireland, including the humble ‘main street’ of many Irish towns and villages. Okay, so you couldn’t get away with a tank top and hipsters in the month of January, as you sift through the half price runners box, with some gentle hip R&B music playing in the background.
In Britain alone, the energy guzzling demands of the service industry jump by no less than 3.7% each year, which represents a greater growth in energy consumption than that of all transport! Are we all suddenly getting the picture? Still feeling sanctimonious in your new 4×4 which has that spanking new catalytic converter technology built in? Presently the Architectural profession is simply not prepared to do their duty, to highlight this important facet in the design of any typical biosphere. Sorry, but no amount of friendy looking ‘air flow’ arrows and diagrams, is going to convince me otherwise. In an era, when we are meant to be so concerned about our environment, then why have we all so suddenly decided building more and more retail infernos, is the best way to go? Why has there not been any serious discussion in any major Irish architectural press about this?
With all respect,
Brian O’ Hanlon.Hi
I am not irish and I am not an architect .
I am italian and I am a lawyer.
But I moved to London 1 year ago and since that date I’ve been working as property administartor for a big worldwide retail company and I got interested in architect and interior retail design.
Our store in Dundrum Town Centre is due to open the next 3rd March together with all the other retailers.
It was a rush and I really hope it will be a success as I worked so hard to get everything ready by that date.
To be honest I think that Town entre will be a success; plans are great and the structure looks modern and funcional.
And if I am not wrong this will be something different from The Jervis Centre, Roches Stores and S. Stephen Green.
Our next oepening will be at Mahon Point, Cork, and I can’t wait to get on site in the next few days and suervey the site.
I’ll survey Dundrum site 2 days before it opens to check the works in our unit and make sure that everything is ok.
And it will be also my first time in Dublin…..very excited!!
Regards
LyaHi,
I am not an architect, I’m a civil engineer. I worked as a student engineer on Dundrum Town centre site last summer. To Lya, I’m sure your store will do great. The place is, in fact, huge, relative to many of Ireland’s other shopping centres, and most people in and around Dundrum are quite enthusiastic about it, they would stop us in the street and ask about it.
The one thing I think developers in this country give little or no consideration to is the effect of the traffic created by these places. I don’t know if anyone knows the Pavilions shopping centre in Swords, North Dublin. Traffic.That’s it. And let’s face it, the southside of the city tends to be one major traffic jam, most of the hours in the day. Dundrum has a by-pass that is very slow most of the day-and that was while construction was taking place. Can we all imagine what it’ll be like, with 3 carpark entrances opening onto it when this place opens?The centre of Dundrum itself has very narrow roads too.
Aside from all this, the centre is quite impressive inside. And I’m pretty sure that I, for one, will probably be out there in the very near future! 🙂There’s a Dundrum retailer on Joe Duffy at the moment discussing how the same company that built the new shopping centre also owns the old shopping centre and has bought up ‘half the property’ in the village. This retailer claims that all the independent (non-chainstore) shops have been barred from renting property in the town and are all to be evicted form the old shopping centre in the coming month.
It’s incredible the amount of PR being generated about a new mall.
I would love to see a section of every major shopping centre to have an integral section devoted to a farmers market
thus maintaining a real social link between the urban and the rural. And of course providing us with real food!The article below is a good summary of the American model of Shopping Centre:
http://www.gsd.harvard.edu/research/publications/hdm/back/9onplace_vanderbilt.html
@DublinLimerick wrote:
I would love to see a section of every major shopping centre to have an integral section devoted to a farmers market
thus maintaining a real social link between the urban and the rural. And of course providing us with real food!Mahon Point in Cork will be dedicating designated days in the near future to ‘old style’ markets along its sizeable malls. Independent, local and countryside businesses or even individual persons with a product to offer will be invited to particpate – everything from knitwear to homemade cheeses and homemade tarts is apparently to be made available.
@FrankTaylor wrote:
There’s a Dundrum retailer on Joe Duffy at the moment discussing how the same company that built the new shopping centre also owns the old shopping centre and has bought up ‘half the property’ in the village. This retailer claims that all the independent (non-chainstore) shops have been barred from renting property in the town and are all to be evicted form the old shopping centre in the coming month.
It’s incredible the amount of PR being generated about a new mall.
That’s Crossridge Investments, owned by Castlethorn Construction – managed by Joe O’Reilly. Its true about the old shopping centre being in their ownership, it will be subject to a Phase 2 extension of the existing Town Centre with additional retail units, some residential, park facility, hotel – among others.
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