Shopping Centre Architecture
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@lexington wrote:
St. Stephen’s Green SC.
Any opinions?
https://archiseek.com/content/showthread.php?t=3134&page=3&pp=25
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https://archiseek.com/content/showpost.php?p=24756&postcount=59
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https://archiseek.com/content/showpost.php?p=24756&postcount=59
It is an ageing investment with little or no architectural merit vis-a-vis its contemporaries and the air-conditioning system needs a full- refit.
…awkward silence…
😀
The St Stephen’s Green Centre has held up very well – it is often forgotton that it was the largest shopping centre in Ireland when completed 😮
(till the Square opened in 1990(?))The Green Centre has a high-spec interior and interest is injected into its layout with the ‘conservatory’ stores filling the ground floor, and the store type refreshingly changes as you move up the floors. But as pointed out before, the floor access arrangements never worked – often wondered if this was deliberate to force the customer to walk long distances to get to the stairs, window shopping in the process.
In terms of the stores, never been an attraction for me – dominated by female fashion and over-priced ‘niche’ stores on the lower levels.
Agreed the new Kylemore space is very fine – and the seating that has always overlooked the Green looks amazing (though I’ve never gone over).
I’d hate to see the Green Centre ‘updated’ and recieve the straight line treatment. It is what it is, of its time, so just leave it alone.
Agreed the air-con needs updating, the Regency green panels would do with a facelift (bet it’ll be beige!), and the exterior steelwork needs repainting too – but that’s all.There is a much wider issue, you need to absorb in order to fully grasp what the shopping centre is about. As I often say about urban design, the worse thing possible that you can do, is to just view its facets in isolation. That is typically the sort of ’cause-effect’ mentality we now have in urban design. Running a country and considering urban design, have something in common, it is about the interaction of so many influences, it is all just one big system.
So just bearing this in mind, I am now going to demonstrate, how developments in the urban environment of Dublin are inter-related in their nature. Indeed, how the Financial Services industry development, the closure of banking premises all over the city,… or just the plain lack of investment in the existing banking premises,… and the idea of a Shopping centre retail space,… as just a type of financial service,… for ordinary joe soap people who do not deal in equities and assets, but rather in commodities and consumables.
The key thing to understanding all of this, is the transformation from a world based upon atoms and physical things – to one based on bits and information flow.
Brian O’ Hanlon.
The Gold Standard.
Just after World War II, the Bretton Woods Agreement fixed a conversion rate between dollars adn gold at $35 an ounce, and in turn set exchange rates between the dollar and other currencies. The U.S. government was obliged to convert dollars into gold upon request, using the cache held at Fort Knox. In 1971, saddled by a dwindling gold supply, a persistent recession, and an expensive war in Vietnam, President Nixon took the dollar off the gold standard. Since then, the value of currencies has been fixed solely by what the markets think they are worth. We maintain a polite fiction that money stands for a valuable commodity, but it now represents nothing more than beliefs.
The implications of the end of the gold standard reach far beyond the passionate debates of that time, because of an apparently unrelated event that was quietly happening in a handful of laboratories: in 1971 the ARPANET entered into regular service. This was a project supported by the U.S. Defense Department Advanced Research Projects (DARPA) to create a computer network that had no central control and multiple ways to route messages, just the thing to survive a nuclear attack. In 1971 it had all of fifteen host machines. Its original research function was soon forgotten as the network filled with people sending E-mail, and connecting more computers. With millions of hosts on it by 1989, DARPA gave up on trying to manage the experiment, and the Internet was born.
At the end of the gold standard, computing was done by relatively isolated mainframes; computers were needed to record financial trends but did not create them. With the arrival of instantaneous global connectivity and distributed computing, money can now travel at the speed of light, anywhere, anytime, changing its very nature. The only physical difference between a million and a billion electronic dollars is the storage of ten extra bits to fit the zeros; money has become one more kind of information.
The Electronic Penny.
After all, what could be more useless than a penny? They travel between bowls on shop counters and jars on bureaus because it’s too much trouble to take them back to the bank. There’s a solid economic argument that the net cost of handling pennies exceeds their worth, therefore they should be eliminated as the smallest currency unit. The future of the penny does not look bright.
Qualify that: the future of a physical penny does not look bright. The value of electronic pennies is just beginning to be appreciated. On the Internet the packets of data representing financial exchanges are a drop in the bucket compared to high-bandwidth media such as video. THere’s plenty of room to send much more of them. The total amount of money in circulation can’t go up, but the size of a transaction can certainly go down. The overhead in selling a product sets a floor on what people are willing to purchase. Either you buy a CD, or you don’t. If, however, the CD arrives as bits on the network, you could pay for it a track at a time. Rather than buying an expensive video game cartridge, you could be billed for each level of the game as you play. Your taxes that pay for garbage collection, or highway maintenance, could be collected each time you take out the trash or drive your car.
Value derived from the market.
Stepping back to recognise that it is more natural to view electronic money as comprising the combination of data describing quantity and algorithms specifying valuation, it then becomes possible to create combinations that are useful for purposes far from high finance. Think what could happen if e-cash contained the means for ordinary people to add rules. A child’s allowance might be paid in dollars that gain value based on the stability of the child’s account balance, to make the benefits of saving apparent in the short term instead of just through the long-term accrual of interest. Or a store’s price guarantee could be implemented by pricing an item in dollars that stay active after the transaction, and that have a value derived from the market for that item. You don’t need to search for the lowest price; the money can.
Tax policies.
Such goals are currently implemented by familiar mechanisms such as tax policies and sales contracts, without needing something so ambitious as a redefinition of the nature of money. But as the money, and the information about how the money can be and is being spent, merge in packets of economic information running around networks, the distinction between the money and the supporting information becomes less and less meaningful, until it becomes simpler to recognise the financial packets as a new definition of money.
Taken from Neil Gershenfeld’s book, When Things Start to Think.
This is just some random thoughts I had while visiting Dundrum Shopping Centre earlier this year,… I have bits to change, edit and add to this piece, but I might as well get something up for the moment.
Brian O’ Hanlon.
Building Organisation.
Even though the building is huge, the plan organisation of the retail units on the site, is simplicity itself. It is like a huge accordion, with the major ‘mega-stores’ book-ending the small retail units in between.
Transport Interchange.
Lets look at an airport for a second. An airport in itself is really a transport hub or interchange. Because from the one point you have buses, taxis, car parking, sometimes trains (except in Ireland, where airports never have trains) and you have flights going to all different destinations around the world.
The Dundrum shopping centre interior experience, does feel a lot like an airport in terms of its scale and treatment. That would be fine if the shopping centre was located next to a couple of major transportation interchanges. If it was in close proximity to an Airport, a major docklands port and a train station or tube station. The argument that Dundrum Shopping Centre is next to a LUAS stop, is only barely plausible. Now if Dundrum Shopping Centre had been next to two different transport systems intersecting, then I would feel the ‘airport’ aesthetic inside the centre had been justified.
The rear car park is a notoriously ill-defined and ill-considered space. It shows very little imagination at all, in how people might navigate through the sea of parked cars. Even the space immediately in front of the centre at the rear has been sacrificed for more car parking spaces, when the reasonable thing to do, would be to place a couple of benchs and treat the space with the attention and details it deserves. Because lets face it, on those nice days, you really don’t want to sit inside a glasshouse and sip coffee while looking at the escalators full of families and kids going up and down.
Here I really feel the designers got things backways. By lavishing far too much attention upon the ‘rock garden’ space with fountains etc, etc,… at the front of the site, which is closest to the existing Dundrum village. And not paying enough attention to the heavily used space at the rear of the centre which is sourthern facing, and could have worked as a very pleasant space to sit down on nice days, with good views of the blue hills in the distance.
The bicycle as a means of transport, wasn’t even considered in the entire design. Despite managing to consume a million or so acres of space. Well not quite that much, but does anyone know exactly the area of the Dundrum site? By not catering for bicycles at all, it is almost as if Dundrum was trying to encourage obesity in the Irish nation. This is definitely a black mark against the whole design concept. But while the design doesn’t cater for people who want to walk or cycle from the neighbouring areas – the complex is nonetheless strategically centered from a car infrastructural point of view – and will be set to become a focus for much of the car-oriented residential development stretching out as far as the Wicklow hills.
Cafes.
This was an oversight I think, by the ‘ideas people’ in the design of Dundrum Shopping Centre. In Dundrum Shopping Centre you have quite a large Eason’s book store, and you have many, many places to drink coffee, buns and all manner of refreshments. But somehow, it never managed to put two and two together, and give the visitors to Dundrum Shopping Centre, a bookshop-cafe. I mean, most of the city centre book sellers have used this concept in different ways down through the years – why didn’t Dundrum try out some form of the bookstore-cafe? Books have always used a technique of selling, which is known as ‘sampling at the source’. Even ‘Amazon.com’, the huge American online bookstore has managed to digitally scan millions of books, and make that content ‘sample-able’ via their website, so that online customers would get a similar experience of buying books, to those in a physical bookstore.
Just while I am at it – another thing about cafes. While the rest of Dublin is trying to do ‘outdoor’ cafes on side-walks and open spaces all over the city. Outside in Dundrum, where space seems to abound, there isn’t one single outdoor cafe experience in the entire complex. There is all sorts of uses, that you can ‘combine’ a cafe with,… with furniture and household goods, you can have an Art Gallery which has a cafe,… but in Dundrum, the food outlet, is just a food outlet.
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