Epic Games just bought a North Carolina mall for its new headquarters
theverge.com
theverge.com
Working in a converted mall might as well be working in a prison, for all I can tell. The walkway through the middle was kind of nice (and the food court still functioned as a cafeteria, so you could walk fully indoors during cold winter/hot summer days to get a coffee or lunch)... but I think I'd still rather be able to see the outdoors from my desk.
The mall is in Cary, NC (Raleigh-Durham / RTP area).
Ironically, I was thinking it'd be kind of cool to work in an old mall building (with the typical US indoor shopping mall layout). Inefficient in many ways (parking, space utilization, HVAC), but the idea of locating teams in small (fishbowl?) office-like pods seems interesting.
Natural light would be a problem. The food court could be appealing...
Some of the complaints you mention sound like they might be specific to that building? Commercial floors should be standard build slab/tray concrete in a mall or office building. Retail HVAC should be adequate if inefficient.. Then again, a failed mall might have failed for a long list of reasons, and a crappy physical plant is definitely one of them!
Demolishing isn't really that expensive, at this kind of scale.
It might seem like I'm splitting hairs, but actually urban design and working/living environment is exactly hypothesised to be one of those cases. It's why some people argue successful downturn areas and urban environments with walkability and diversity of use/design/ spectacle (so not most US cities), because they have evolved that way from lots of little distributed inconsistent designs, but with individual members tested, repurposed and surviving due to evolution over time.
When a big developer or mega Corp develops or designs, you don't get natural evolution and diversity of design over time, you get mass sameness and waterfall design. It's why you get planned community aesthetics and corporate brand + policy rather than what organically works. The best of them might be bright and shiny (see Apple office/campus), but they still have the overarching ethos of singular design and absolute central/corporate control. Some people like that environment, personally I don't like working in it (don't get me wrong, i'd rather work in a good one rather than a bad one though).
In practice they don't get it perfect. I imagine a lot of people could list problems with the Apple campus in practice, and I'd be good money this isn't going to be the Apple campus...
I do support treating addiction as a health problem rather than a crime. But the current approach in cities like San Francisco is wrecking quality of life for regular people.
Yes. There's a documentary called "Seattle is Dying" that covers a lot of it (particularly the open air drug use), but you might have a hard time finding it because of the recent riots, economic collapse, etc.
I was wondering how it was possible for Macy's retail employees to work in the mall prior to Amazon's purchase, but how it was unsuitable for software engineers. Surely at one point the Macy's employees were selling fancy clothes, perfumes, and housewares from that location...
I'm sure the costs would be prohibitive at most malls, but the best use of a mall I can think of would be to use the former stores for SCIFs and other secure work areas, onsite hosting, etc. then maximize skylights for the central atrium. The lack of windows in the former store spaces works in one's favor in these use cases.
I have a friend who lives across the street from Epic's existing HQ. It looks like a fun-looking building to work in, I have a hard time imagining Cary Towne Center not being a downgrade no matter how much cash you throw at renovation. Just getting the all-permeating smell of stale roasted popcorn out of the concrete is going to take a small fortune.
I'm sure they got that mall really, really cheap. Here's the current store list.[1] They're down to 22 small tenants, including the co-working space and the model train club.
Serious pivot: there are a lot of hobby, public-service, and charitable organizations which could use permanent, cheap space with minimal features: woodworking and craft groups, maker spaces, library branches, model train clubs, indoor community gardening, political party offices, various service organizations. Why is there no efficient strategy to get them into the large number of empty mall spaces?
That's not uncommon, it's just that it usually presages the malls being sold and torn down because they aren't earning any money.
I think even mid 80-90s malls had much more natural light, but Cary Towne Center was built in 79 and I think even if they turned the roof into a sheet of plexiglass that the layout would keep large sections dark. The food court for example is on the first floor and is lined with shops, preventing easy windows of any kind.
Maybe they can use a series of mirrors?
The noise was crazy. Even after taking steps to address the noise it was still an issue. Not much you can do with all the concrete a mall is typically made of.
And the 2nd floor shook and moved around a lot after folks moved in. It was actually nauseating.
IME, the effort needed to reduce unwanted noise depends a lot on the frequency range.
Very roughly speaking, dampening high-frequency sounds can be done with relatively thin and light sound-absorbing materials. Lower-frequency noise, including vibrations that shake the building's superstructure, require more extensive modifications.
It would be awesome if an actual acoustic engineer or architect could weigh in on this.
It would still have stores. I'd pay to have those stores stocked. Ideally it would have a 90s-era movie theatre in it, too. But otherwise it would be empty.
Why? So that I can live every day like I'm the last surviving human. Dawn of the Dead, minus the flesh eaters.
(Alternative plan: buy up a ghost town. Same plan, otherwise.)
> It would still have stores. I'd pay to have those stores stocked. Ideally it would have a 90s-era movie theater in it, too. But otherwise it would be empty.
Remember that 90s kid movie 'Blank Check?' I wrote a short fan art film script as a 13 year old that followed a similar premise, the origin of the funds were that the kid was a 'hacker' so the kid stole the funds from a crooked stockbroker firm trying to launder their money and ended up taking so much he ended up living in an abandoned mall and 'sold warez' out of the stores with various business models.. I recently saw the notebook and I had clearly recently just saw that movie with Angelina Jolie and Swordfish when I wrote that as that was around the time I had just discovered Newsgroups.
I somehow managed to get to the beginning of the 2nd act and just forgot about it entirely until the day I re-read it, haha. Which for being 13 was more resolve than I thought I had.
Maybe I should revisit that script then... I've definitely gotten more ideas about where it would go now that we're in 2021 and I have way more to work with to flesh it out. It probably wouldn't end up appealing to the Disney crowds like the original, though. Ha.
How is the book app going?
I found more old scripts in boxes I want to update when I have the time, some of my other fan art pilots are digital but lack the proper format of a script and your project sounds interesting for amateur writers as I imagine you have specific templates for the specific type of writing one would use.
All of my formatting is all off and looks like I just wrote long format stories in paragraph with quotes for dialogue as I didn't know any better and just did what I saw in books and wrote with total abandon in a way that only made sense to me.
What would be cool would be able to denote where the arcs and acts are as you're writing to be able to go back to after long pauses.
I'd pay for that! ;)
Sidenote: I think I enjoyed finding out out Ray Bradbury wrote Farenheit 451 on a rented typewriter at UCLA just as much as reading the book, and especially more than watching the movie.
Thanks for asking! PaperbackAuthor is coming along.
> [...] I imagine you have specific templates for the specific type of writing one would use.
Right now I'm shooting for the absolute minimum viable product, so on day one it will be a super simple editor that can export to ePub and PDF.
But I've got lots of idea of features I want to roll out, including support for different types of writing. My theory is that what makes most editing software problematic is they try to create one approach to writing many types of things, so they fail to be particularly good at any one of them. With PaperbackAuthor, I'm building the editor I've always wanted for the purpose of writing novels and novellas.
Later, I might roll out support for, say, screenplays. Or graphic novels. Or text books. Or illustrated books. Etc. Each format deserves its own dedicated editor.
> What would be cool would be able to denote where the archs and acts are as you're writing to be able to go back to after long pauses.
I've got some ideas around this, too. But, I need to make sure they're genuinely useful. Some of my ideas, in hindsight, amount to little more than "Trello-like cards in a sidebar", which isn't much of an improvement over simply keeping Trello in a separate tab or window.
Sounds cool, make sure to do one of those 'Show HN' posts and I'll likely grab it when it comes out! What platforms will it be on, I cannot bring myself to not type on anything but a thinkpad keyboard any more at my age.
It's going to be web-based, so any platform will do. (Including mobile.) But I'm very strongly considering native apps as a next step.
Haha, well I guess we will have to have a sort of writers room section of HN as it seems we have quite a few scribblers to make it come alive.
I'm re-watching hackers and following the storyline I wrote back then. I used to roller-blade like every 90s kids and I forgot how cool it must of have looked back then as I tried to force it into the plot so many times with soliloquy about 'strapping in and suiting up.' Kind of reminded me of Stephenson's writing in Snowcrash about YT getting on her board actually, which was intentionally cheesey for the genre.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEjBDKfrqQI4TgzT9YLNT8g
Guy bought an old silver mining town and has been living there over the pandemic
I grew up down the road from this place.
There are a couple more like this on YouTube. Dead mall videos are a genre.