Shopping Centre Architecture

There is just one more thing, on the subject of Acoustics and Architecture, I would like to deal with though. This Architect, gave a talk recently at Trinity to the AAI,…

http://www.irish-architecture.com/aai/events/data/1108444687.html

By the way, that is an open air community building you are looking at there in the photographs, I know, an open air community building was a first for me too, but it just goes to show, how far we have to climb, in terms of mind-broadening in this country – what the real possibilities are. Imagine that space, full of busy traders or something on a Saturday morning, and the buzz of their activities seeping out through the openings to the streets outside, and attracting the attentions of random passers-by. I am not sure, if putting everything into a glass dome, and blasting hot air into that dome, for all the ‘shoppers’ to feel pleasantly toasted, is the only answer. But the Irish planners and developers seem to have settled upon that paradigm, for the time being anyhow, and that is what every client is climbing over one another, in such a hurry, to achieve.

The Swiss Architect, in question, talked a lot about ‘pushing to the limit, the technology of the wood’. You have to try to do a Swiss accent, to get that right though. Anyhow, during question time at the end, this Swiss Architect was very forthcoming, in wanting to answer all of our questions and queries. Ger Carthy of Grafton Architects, asked what I believe to be a very good question, about a particular multi-storey school building the Swiss Architect had done in Basle or someplace. The question related to the minimalism of the spaces in the school, the whole multi-storey building being cast basically in one single piece of concrete, and it had exposed concrete all over the place, in its finished state. But Ger asked quite rightly, what effect did this have upon the functional operation of a school? That, with all the exposed concrete material, would there not be a problem with echos etc. The school was full of open plan circulation areas, lightwells, and all sorts of really ‘cool stuff’, that Architects love to deal with. 🙂 Yeah, the school did seem like a ‘calming oasis of knowledge’.

Anyhow, the Architect put special absorbant sound panels, just the minimum required, and they were so minimal, as not to look overbearing, they were integrated with the style of the architecture. The School teachers love the building, have no problems with noise, or echos, and can teach just fine. Now, the problem I find with the Shopping Centre, is that it does something very weird with noise, when a place is full of thousands of busy shoppers, when you most expect to hear the ring of heels clipping off of hard surfaces, like you do in Trinity, or in Stillorgan open walkway streets, or in a semi-pedestrianised shopping area,… in Shopping centres, this very attractive sound of the clipping of heels, or people moving about,… which would also be the attraction of a nice piazza, side walk cafe in any great European city,…. this aspect is simply missing in the shopping centre.

Don’t get me wrong, I know all about ‘the roar’ that Grafton Street can emit, when you are walking up it, full of bustly shoppers, and how terribly uncomfortable that is. But the sound of peoples movements, in a shopping centre, doesn’t really work – or the music in the centre is getting over it. Maybe there is simply too much absorbant materials, or something. But the shopping centre space, really deprives you of that one nice thing, about communal shopping areas – the acoustic dimension. I am thinking of when I was at Helsinki, and the harbour side fish market, in the big square at the centre of that city, where people mingled through the stalls, walking on cobbles and being intoxicated with the many smells, sounds of people selling/buying and enjoying themselves. Interestingly, Michael M., mentioned this aspect about the design of the Liffery Board walk, and compared it with sitting in the folks car, at summertime, driving over the wooden bridge to Bull Island. I can even think of a good example closer to home, that of the St. Stephen’s Green Shopping Centre, where the OPW I think, decided to keep all of the old materials, like old wooden planks and walkways, that creak and move slightly, reverberate, when you traverse across them. I quite like this, and it humanises the place very sucessfully I think.

The National Gallery extension by Benson and Forsyth isn’t bad either, I like the way that sounds merge together and float around through the space is wonderfully exciting and cool ways. When you talk about ‘freedom’, it is really weird, just the kinds of qualities of space, that most of all underline for the participant in the Architecture a sense of freedom, or not. Michael McGarry, spoke too of the limited ‘infrastructure’ associated with some of the most wonderful and memorable public spaces in older European cities,… for the horse race in Sienna, they put down straw so that the horses don’t slip, but that is really the only ‘maintenance’ they get. Open space, has the potential to work this kind of magic, at its best,… I noticed that O’Connell street has begun to change ‘acoustically’ for the better in its lower half too, where the pedestrian margins have been widened, and somehow, the traffic isn’t ‘the only’, thing you hear now on O’ Connell Street. But funny, how the top half of O’Connell Street, still has the deafening ‘roar’ of bus diesel engines and motorbike two-stroke engines whizzing in and out… you stand around the old Carlton and you are still just ‘blown away from that traffic noise.

But for my own money, the Jervis Centre, or any of these modern indoor complexes do not transfer this ‘free’ kind of feel of space, because of reasons like acoustics,… amongst many others. I would understand in a prison, or some awful facility for holding people captive, the designer of an ‘institution’ wanting to communicate a feeling of captivity to the participant, in the architecture,… but I simply don’t understand, why a shopping complex would want to make you feel ‘internalised, and trapped’…. maybe some people find it safe or something, dunno. But then you have that awful contrast, when you finally emerge with your shopping to the multi-storey carpark, and you are back again, in this cold, drafty, lofty, tar-macked, oil-smelling, possibly rat-infested garage entrance,… which is the car parks in the shopping centres. On this subject, I think Carme Pinos, spoke nicely about her approach to designing car parks, for multi-storey office buildings.

But finally, on the subject of cars, and tracking your movements, gathering information etc,… I think, when I opened up the Evening Hearld last night, and saw on the front page, a feature about the Gardai, having a camera on every corner, connected up to a system, which could search your number plate, and find out everything about you in seconds,… well, how long is it, until the eyeballs in everyones’ head are going to get bar-coded too, so that the entire city just becomes like one big prison? I found it interesting, how the traffic engineering department too, who have been responsible for so much anti-social design in cities over the recent decades, how they have been so quick to get to this table, and begin feasting on all of this information, they can gather about people/movements. Of course, the real trick, will be ‘to scan’ each and every car that goes into the shopping centre, and track that frequency against, what they buy, how much they buy, and all kinds of other ‘information’ that exists out there now about people, barely separated systems, by what could only be called ‘Chinesse Walls’,… the physical world we live in nowadays, has increasingly just become a shadow of the virtual one.

Brian O’ Hanlon.

This article from last weeks Sunday Times discusses some of the consequences of shopping centres on freedom of speech:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,2766-1542947,00.html

Garethace,

Bear in mind that in order to raise venture capital, entrepreneurs sell the most commercially optimistic possibilities of every technology. 95% of the time these visions fail to materialise. When you want to sell a vision, it helps to have a good story, a credible, fascinating narrative – something a journalist can re-use to entertain his readers. As a result, the media is full of overblown technological prophesies that we later look back on with shame and amusement.

Shops have collected vast quantities of point-of-sale data for decades and have mostly obtained little value from it. I can’t see any difference between modern loyalty card schemes and green shield stamps.

Architecture is losing market share to information systems. You buy from Amazon, so there’s less money to pay an architect to do a new Waterstones. But there is also competition from edge-cities. Lots of buildings that are obviously devoid of architectural input line the M50. This type of retailing cares less about architecture than a city centre flagship store like Arnotts or Selfridges- but this doesn’t matter because these boxes have very short lifespans. Every time I drive past Dunnes in Cornelscourt it seems to have another plastic makeover. I’m glad it’s so ugly because nobody will miss it when it’s gone

Trying to understand, all of these things, on so many different scales is challenging I will admit,… ten years ago, I simply could not have gotten my head around it very well,… that is the trouble, when you are a mere student stumbling across the odd architectural journal with articles about Edge City etc. So lets just carry on the same vein as the rest of my posting here, and deal with Edge City as a concept.

I happened to find this piece today, which uses the metaphor of containerisation in the physical world, to explain packets of data, the little bits of information, that are the nuts and bolts of how the Internet works. It is a rather nice piece of writing I think, and manages to draw together two separate ideas from the virtual and physical worlds. The other important thing to know about how the Internet works, is that the Internet, ‘is a network of networks’,… rather than a top-down imposed uniform system. Noone actually maintains the whole system, it is just a whole bunch of different, independent systems, which are virtually simulated into a seamless whole,… through the use of packets, which are like the standardised containers, and also things called routers, (think products from Cisco Systems etc) which are like the cranes that do all the heavy lifting at ports and railway stations.

The TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) idea was the electronic equivalent of the containerisation revolution which transformed the transport of international freight. The basic idea in the freight case was agreement on a standard size of container which would fit ships’ holds, articulated trucks and rail wagons. Almost anything could be shipped inside a container, and special cranes and handling equipment were created for transferring containers from one transport mode to another. In this analogy, the transport modes (sea, road, rail) correspond to different computer networks; the containers correspond to the TCP envelopes; and the dockside and trackside cranes correspond to the Cert-Kahn (Inventors of TCP) gateways (routers). And just as the crane doesn’t care what’s inside a container, the computer gateway (router) is unconcerned about the contents of the envelope. Its responsibility is to transfer it safely on the next leg of its journey through Cyberspace.

Simple though it is, the Cerf-Kahn idea of a gateway (router) linking different types of network was the key both to the subsequent growth of the Internet and to the explosion in creativity which it fostered. Its emphasis on ‘end-to-end’ reliability meant that the network would essentially be indifferent to what it was used for. The gateways (routers) had only one task – that of getting packets from one place to another. They cared nothing for what those packets represented. As far as the network was concerned, a packet containing a fragment of a love letter was the same as one containing a corner of a pornographic photograph or a segment of a digitised telephone conversation.

So you can understand what I mean, when I say the crack between the virtual world and the physical world is getting wider all of the time,… as more and more of Cyberspace, jumps into the physical world, and becomes ‘Edge City’, a world of standardised containers and articulated lorry transport, railway hubs and ports which are large containerised warehouses. Modern technical journalism and everyday press has focussed on the notion, of everything ‘moving onto the Internet’,… moving into Cyberspace,… but the reverse is also just as true. The movement of Cyberspace back down into the physical environment, simpy hasn’t got the same press, except for a few vague architectural notions, like that of Edge City, which tries rather desperately to grapple with a huge issue now facing the urban environment.

By the way, most of the companies we know nowadays, with any established success in doing business through the Internet – the Dell Computers, the Amazons, the Fed-Ex Parcel Delivery Service, Walmart Supermarkets in the US – all of those have foremost come to realise the opportunities now afforded, by use of containerisation, transportation, and that whole physical/virtual reality which is Edge City. I think one of the funny, or not so funny examples, James Marcus cited in his book Amazonia, was while helping out in the Christmas rush in the Amazon.com warehouse in Seattle, how he would roll a trolley around a huge warehouse somewhere on the outskirts of that city, collecting the orders that customers placed through the Internet. Remember this was Christmas time, and one order he put together for a customer included a company of ‘Mein Kamp’ by Adolf Hitler. Now, I think that probably underlines what was said above, about the packets/containers not even caring what was inside. 🙂

Brian O’ Hanlon.

P.S. This kind of report, will probably make more sense to the PlayStation Generation Forum Members, but I will post it anyhow:

http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2005/03/23/extended_outages_for_world_of_warcraft.html

@garethace wrote:

there is this thing called irony

Indeed there is.

Will do that, thanx.

Just put a quick link here so I can find it again:

http://www.ireland.com/cgi-bin/dialogserver?CMD=&SAVEDB=newspaper&SAVEORGANISE_CODED=R:date0&SAVETHRESHOLD=90&SAVESTARTDATE0=01/04/2005&SAVEENDDATE0=01/04/2005&SAVEQUERY00=&TOPDOC=130

I have noticed, however, that noone has picked up on the obvious Kevin Lynch, Image of a City,…

Kinds of parallels, I have been exploring here, with my ideas about webspace and edge city, and shopping centre architecture. The notion, that people draw out a picture of the city in their brains, and that defines how people use the city. One of the most common, although, dis-inter-mediated techniques of navigation these days,… is the rocket-fuelled, ‘Smart’ broadband way, of the world wide web.

I cannot decide honestly, if the people themselves expect cities to replicate that kind of navigational experience, or if planners lay it out that way,… but it is a curious question indeed.

Brian O’ Hanlon.

Thanks for that Lotts. Probably the best writing on shopping centres is ‘Variations on a Theme Park : The New American City and the End of Public Space’ by Michael Sorkin. It was written in 1992. Many of these articles that appear in newspapers etc seem to be just a repeat of the main points made by Sorkin et al.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0374523142/qid=1112881090/sr=8-2/ref=pd_csp_2/103-7181276-4383850?v=glance&s=books&n=507846

Drat,
tidy up going on here, opps. 🙂

Put everythign into one post above.

Just going back through this discussion, picking out some useful bits, as I go along.

True, the inside is just like every other shopping centre. But I still maintain it integrates well with older Dundrum.

By this Devin, I think you are coming from the observation, that many shopping centres just landed from outer space on top of some pheripheral site, and just created acres of parking spaces around them. It is quite true, that Dundrum adopted a different approach, it didn’t do the usual thing. It seems a bit obvious I guess, but yeah, what you have said is true and fairly simple to understand. I am not in the habit of looking at very many suburban shopping centres from a design perspective, so at first I didn’t quite notice how much Dundrum departs from the norm. You are obviously much quicker at noticing things about suburbia than I am. I feel more familiar with urban or rural sites I have to confess. Some other poster mentions how the site itself was an industrial site acquired for a mere 10 million. Which for a site, like this, seems quite small. I guess it highlights, something about strategic location having much more potential, than a massive arbitrary green field site development.

I guess, with your above observation Devin, you have underlined a fairly obvious fact: that is, where the circa 1980s shopping centre concept, would have came from,… accompanied with an explosion in personal car ownership, cities got the bright idea to do shopping centres as a big huge space, with enough space for loads and loads of cars. Shopping centres nearly became a car park with some shops, as opposed to being some shops with car parking. The shops were almost an afterthought, the buildings and the architecture were made to last for ten years or so, and that was it. Dundrum struggles to re-address that imbalance, is a start, to getting a more sane balance between car lot and shopping space. Dundrum centre does feel a little more like some shops with some car parking, as opposed to the other way around. The initial impetus behind the shopping centre concept may have been: provide loads of car parking spaces, and the rest will take care for itself. But I guess, there are many examples of centres around, where the ‘rest’ didn’t take care of itself very well. Maybe shopping centres aren’t that simple, maybe Dundrum does look at the design problem more in depth.

Brian O’ Hanlon.