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Comment by tsunamifury | Hacker News Reader

Forcing shopping activity and gathering into indoor brutalist buildings is dying, shopping centers are not. Look at union sq, 4th st, walnut creek, and many others in the sf bay. All are stronger than ever by offering very high end retail mixed with high quality independent offerings and unique chef-driven eateries.

What people have abandoned is indoor, stale, sunlight less, copycat malls with the same awful pizza and Chinese chains and the same terrible jewelry stores.

People want shopping centers to reflect regional and local character, be in town centers, and offer high quality unique options with a few staples. Get rid of the huge parking lots and add a grocer.

However tacitly this article is pointing to a possible larger problem in the Midwest where cold weather, and permanently depressed economy and a talent drain is leaving them without the tools to build interesting gathering places. This is a far larger and sadder issue.

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In Europe, malls are still constructed in many places and they have the advantage of being built a few decades after many of the US malls.

Where I live summers are a bit too warm and winters a bit too cold to make outdoor shopping joyful. Also, streets are noisy and full of aggressive drivers and the sidewalks are full of holes and broken tiles. So in the last few years this 1.5M population city has seen the construction of 10 shopping malls, most of which are actually really nice "gathering places" as you put it and most of which seem to thrive.

One advantage from most of the US malls that I have been to is that cars are parked under the malls, not around them, that most of the malls are built near subway or tram stops and that they somehow fit nicely into the surrounding architecture.

Often the malls are built in the city center and usually in a very nice quality. Usually the malls have one major supermarket chain in the basement that acts as an anchor store and usually they have a cinema and a food court in the top floor that offers not just the usual fast food but often also some decent food.

I really enjoy shopping in a mall and until someone fixes the problem of waiting and paying for delivery I don't see online shopping making malls obsolete.

On a brief but pleasant trip to Switzerland, I got around using their wonderful transit system. Every transit station was also a commercial hub. Big stations had big shops like supermarkets and department stores. Little stations had little shops like bakeries and banks.

Any restructuring of retail shopping in the US would have to include thinking about how entire districts are laid out. It takes one person -- the owner -- to restructure a mall, but considerably more cooperation and time to restructure neighborhoods.

In some cases this is already happening. The best known example I can think of is Tyson's Corner in Northern Virginia. Already a shopping and commercial area, they're building the a new metro line out to it. This is coinciding with a restructuring of the entire area to be pedestrian friendly instead of car focused and it's absolutely transforming the entire city. It's probably the largest restructuring program in the U.S. at present. Each metro stop is either a shopping paradise or near a bunch of professional offices. All new residential complexes are being planned and the area is absolutely exploding with activity.

http://www.fairfaxcounty.gov/tysons/

Tysons is the suck. They're not restructuring it so much as trying to work around the piss-poor depressingly suburban "urban planning" of the place. Yes, it's got a metro line now, but it's a big concrete monstrosity along the middle of a huge multi-lane road, instead of the sleek, organic, integrated transit you see in places like Chicago or New York.[1] Most of the stops drop you off in a giant parking lot along side Route 7. The attempts to make Tyson's "pedestrian friendly" involve basically giving up on the existing street-level and building an elevated walking level connecting the mall and a few office buildings and apartment buildings.

A much better example is Atlantic Station in Atlanta: http://atlanticstation.com. They nuked the existing streets and put in a human-scale street grid: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8a/Atlantic_.... All the parking is underground or at the periphery of the development. The only thing missing is a subway stop (the Arts Center stop is across that awful oppressive highway).

[1] Contrast http://wamu.org/sites/wamu.org/files/styles/headline_landsca... with http://mlmerillat.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/chicago-el1.jp....

Yeah Tysons is still a warzone right now. But they're on something like year 5 of a 35 year restructuring plan. I still have high hopes. There's lots of weirdness left over from the previous "design", like stations letting off into low density areas like next to a bunch of car dealerships. But the overall plan I think is still promising. If they can convert those low density areas into high density housing, offices and mixed-zone shopping.

I do wish it was more revolutionary like your examples, but there's not much reason to think that Tyson's won't look a bit more like Chicago's loop in 20 years.

I'm actually on the side of wishing our local politicians had gotten their heads out of their asses and buried the lines, but we get what we get and I'm of the ilk that still thinks elevated lines look retro futuristic and cool.

http://cooldcre.com/image_store/uploads/8/6/5/6/4/ar13436975...

http://dcmud.blogspot.com/2011/02/tysons-developers-plan-40-...

http://thetysonscorner.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Tysons...

TBH, it doesn't affect me at all, except that Tyson's, being so overly car centric, is a place I don't go because it's such a grind to get around right now. That and I'm still hoping they extend the line out to Dulles so we'll finally live in a fully connected urban area that befits the density of NoVA and D.C.

> That and I'm still hoping they extend the line out to Dulles so we'll finally live in a fully connected urban area that befits the density of NoVA and D.C.

IMO, as another denizen of the D.C. area, the Silver Line, once completed, will not fully connect the D.C. area. There are other developed areas that will still not be reachable.

Take the 28 corridor, for instance: home to the NRO, a bunch of defense contractors, tech companies, the Dulles Expo Center, the Air and Space Museum, and a lot of residential and office space. This region will still not be connected. Going up and down 28 itself is something that almost certainly has to be done by car; I don't know of many (or any) buses that would enable one to get from, say, Centreville to Reston.

>One advantage from most of the US malls...is that cars are parked under the malls, not around them...

Thanks for bringing this up. Dealing with parking is a much more complex problem than was assumed for the last 50 years or so. Better modeling should improve the situation going forward though, and could help effectively redevelop some of these megamall wastelands too.

I imagine that big part of that is the large percentage of the US population that leaves on or near a coast. Major underground excavation isn't really possible when ground level is only 10m or so above sea level/the water table.

Some malls in Spain use attached parking buildings instead. They aren't pretty, but they do allow the mall to remain inside the city.

A few years ago I went to a mall in Stuttgart. The interesting thing was I could have been in any mall in America. The layout, architecture, parking garage, etc., was right out of the US, and even the advertising was all in English. It's like eating at McDonald's in Tokyo. What's the point?

It's like eating at McDonald's in Tokyo. What's the point?

Shaka Shaka Chicken, of course.

What's the point?

To quote Pulp fiction "It's the little differences". I love going to malls and supermarkets when I'm in a new country or city. Sure they're 95% the same, but those other 5% are often unique for the area and quite telling.

I lived in Germany around 1970 when there were no malls or McDonald's there. What was fun was even department stores were palpably different than in the US. Everything was different, and that made it much more fun. Even the grocery stores were way, way different (I sure loved the German cheese selection!).

The Villagio in Doha is a good example of little differences, like an ice skating rink located in the middle of the food court and a knock-off of the Venetian's canal running through it.

Which mall in Stuttgart? I lived there a few years ago and never noticed the shopping areas looking American...

I don't recall, other than it was a big one.

There is no such thing as "Europe".

I don't know of any malls being constructed in the Netherlands.

Leidschenhage (http://www.denhaagdirect.nl/winkelcentrum-leidschenhage-verb...)

In de Bogaard, includes 3 malls according to http://www.denhaag.nl/en/residents/to/In-de-Bogaard.htm

This actually isn't true. Europe is a real place, unlike Middle Earth or Narnia or Canada. It's just west of Asia and north of Africa, if you can believe it!

Brutalist? Don't you think that's a little hyperbolic? Every mall I've witnessed has had interior and exterior design far from brutalist. Pretty nice-looking, really.

A popular one around here actually has a large skylight spanning most of the middle of the roof.

There are a lot of good reasons to prefer an indoor place. The weather's often not comfortable outside. It's only really perfectly comfortable for a time throughout the year that sums to maybe a few months over here. Maybe you're used to some place where it's the perfect weather all year?

"People want shopping centers to reflect regional and local character, be in town centers, and offer high quality unique options with a few staples. Get rid of the huge parking lots and add a grocer."

Do they really want all that, or do they just want some place with a bunch of stores and maybe a movie theater and food court, in a nice indoor climate-controlled environment and some light music in the background?

You just admitted in your last paragraph that the weather in that place makes an outdoor gathering less desirable.

Brutalism is a style, not a term of abuse. It does often refer to high modernist 1960s and 1970s buildings which are expensive to operate, having been constructed before environmental friendliness was on the agenda. Some people don't like the rectilinear boxes and raw concrete, but that's not why the term brutalism is applied to a particular subset of the buildings of that period: it was the popular name of an aesthetic movement, for better or worse. The architects in question were influenced by the Japanese aesthetic of wabi sabi, as well as the notorious (but admittedly brilliant) Le Corbusier.

Here's a picture of where I went to college: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6f/Courtyard...

You can think of it as Caprica from Battlestar Galactica, or the FBI HQ in the X Files. Brutalism in its full glory. Even crazier is the library: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Library-SFU-Burnaby-Britis...

I know some people have a rather low opinion about SFU academics, but maybe calling it a college is a little harsh ;)

U of T did you one better: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Robarts_Library.JPG

I swear only Canada makes this distinction between "university" and "college". In the US they call what we call college "community college".

And.. holy crap, that library is freaking awesome. Although, I think the Geisel Library at UCSD takes the cake: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Geisel-Library.jpg

And the UK, and much of the rest of the world. In the UK, college usually refers to either sixth form or Further Education college, between secondary school and university.

Even in America, there was a distinction, or at least there used to be. If it was a "college" then that meant there was limited to no opportunity for graduate studies. On the other hand, a "university" offered full undergraduate as well as graduate programs for most subjects. In highschool, I remember noting that some colleges where quite prestigious, such as Dartmouth and Harvey Mudd College.

I consider myself a fan of Brutalist architecture in all its bulky, muscular glory, but Robarts just about borders on frightening to me.

Oh god, the fire-escape-as-a-useless-tower-over-an-inaccessible-bridge trope... again. It's a stupid enormous waste of concrete and steel, and would actually be kind of OK if there were a way to get in there and survey the area without setting off alarms.

I'm sure I've seen your college on stargate :)

Just to emphasize this, the term "brutalist" derives from the French "brut", not English "brutal". "Brut" means "raw", and is used to describe the exposed concrete central to this style. Although both words derive from the same Latin word brutus, that word means both "heavy" and "stupid", with the French word deriving from the former and the English word deriving from the latter. (Or so Wiktionary tells me.)

The way I'd heard it in school was that it was a style made to purposely be as unlikably soulless as possible as some kind of statement. That's apparently not true?

Not really. If you can get past the AR paywall (which is a bit erratic) you can read one of the original statements of the movement here: http://www.architectural-review.com/8603840.article Slightly contentious recent discussion of the broader style here: http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/feb/13/jonathan...

There's some good tongue in cheek commentary about the style in this podcast:

http://kunstlercast.com/shows/kunstlercast_111_brutalism.htm...

"Darth Vader" windows :-)

Of course, the host's main concern is about peak oil, so he would have some other things to say about the gradual decline of malls.

I'm not as extreme, but mail order is definitely more economical than frequent commutes to a far away shopping center. I'm glad I live within easy biking distance from an outdoor shopping center, which has many little restaurants (chain & local) to hit for lunch when working from home, as well as a theatre, Target & a "Whole Foods"-like grocery store. I can carry a fair amount of stuff home on bike rack "pannier" bags, and sometimes only get in the car one or two days a week to make an appearance at work. Only the Target has decent bike racks, though. Otherwise, trees and trash cans get pressed into service :-)

In Ireland it rains a lot. The one big mall built recently in the city I live in is always busy. Why? Because you won't get wet going from shop to shop. Not a single vacant space. You get a bit of daylight from a strip of glass in the roof. Typical food court, multiplex, big name grocery store, car valeting, farmer's market once a week, clothing retailers, there are very few things you can not get there - the only annoyance is that the DIY, home improvement, outdoorsy stuff, car stuff, electrical and electronics, is across the road and over a bit in this weird appendage space :( Also chock-a-block.

If you have kids this is doubly important, you don't get wet! (Or cold I suppose). If traditional retail could solve this then well done them, but how? I'm not keen on the sterile everything-is-a-chainstore atmosphere of indoors malls but you can't argue with the convenience and the not getting wetness. I would prefer multi-storey car parking though, I hate the sprawl of these enormous car parks, so ugly! why not build a tall multi-storey car park and lots of nice green spaces with trees and ponds and fountains?

>> indoor, stale, sunlight less, copycat malls with the same awful pizza and Chinese chains and the same terrible jewelry stores.

What a depressing yet accurate description. Growing up in California suburbia, spending time with friends or family at the (Brea, Santa Ana) malls was always mind numbing. Those places had no life or character. Others didn't seem as bothered, and I've chalked that up to my mood being more influenced by my surroundings than most. Even today I find my mood and productivity drastically affected by the age, quality, design, openness, brightness, etc of my work environment.

My biggest problem with malls is the pervasive aroma of human flatulence that seems to be everywhere. Maybe that's why so many of the shops spray perfume/cologne into the air.

Ontario mills, Montclair mall, Brea mall, all mind numbing indeed. The only malls I enjoy in socal are the ultra high end ones like southcoast plaza, simply because they sell nice things that I can tangibly handle. All the other dingy, musty malls (ie. Ontario mills) are the absolute last choice for me, opting for open air alternatives such as Victoria Gardens.

To be fair, Ontario Mills is an outlet mall and can't really be compared to Southcoast plaza - the highest of high end malls.

thanks for the clarification, it's been so long since I've been to any indoor malls in socal.

Exactly.

Take for example the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II in Milan[1]. It's in the city center, it's visually spectacular, it's unique, and it's a fun place to visit, eat lunch, window shop, or spend (too much) money. It's been around for 150 years which indicates that this is a sustainable model for a shopping mall in a dense & vibrant city.

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galleria_Vittorio_Emanuele_II

Being next to one of the main tourist attractions of the city has probably helped. All of those damned pigeons...

At the same time, outdoor car-centric outlet-malls are still plentiful if not gaining steam, and they have all the hideous disadvantages of the traditional mall plus the problem that people drive from store to store and you're not even protected from the elements if you choose to walk from one store to the next.

It is extremely rare for malls to be housed in brutalist buildings.

Most of the malls I've seen are closer to postmodern architecture: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmodern_architecture

What happened is more of a change in cultural expectations that malls and their stale corporate overlords did not and were not able to adapt to. There is no reason that malls could not have been revamped and renovated to adjust, but I think that ship has sailed. People have given up on those areas where malls are located, which makes the extensive capital investments necessary to make any such changes even more impossible now than when they should have been made.

Exactly. Union Square has better places to eat and drink near by that are way better than a standard, factory mall box. You can also just walk around or hang out in the small park. Stanford Mall has this in a different style as well as Milbrae, Burlingame, and Santana Row. They all have 'character'.

I was going to come here to say this. I've lived in a couple of college towns in California (Davis and Santa Cruz), and they both have a Gap in the downtown area. Strolling downtown, especially in Santa Cruz, is just a Thing To Do, like going to the mall used to be. It's where you see the Santa Cruz character, grab a cookie from the cookie store, and mooch around looking in shop windows. Essentially the exact same mall activity.

That said, as the article focuses on Gap, I think their problems are far more pronounced than just malls or online. The Gap and Baby Gap store in Santa Cruz are almost always completely empty, and that seems to be the case for most places. I get the feeling Target is just dominating them, selling the same clothes cheaper.

I've even noticed that Stonestown, a parking-lot surrounded anachronism in SF, has remained quite busy, despite being close to neighborhood commercial corridors. They've moved towards offering more community events: movie nights, Chinese New Year celebrations, etc. They also added Trader Joe's a few years ago, which has been a major draw.

The entire place used to be an outdoor mall, but a skylight was added to keep out the notorious SF fog while retaining natural light.

The next logical step in its transformation would be moving more of the parking into structures or underground, and building apartments on the land. But that would require the blessing of neighbors and activists in the area, not an easy task.

Boston has it nailed, though Boston also used to have one of the most prestigious high streets on the planet.

Although they've gotten increasingly commercially commoditized, Quincy Market/Faneuil Hall, Newbury Street and the Prudential Center are mostly done right. The Prudential Center is the most "gray box" of them all, but the skylight that cuts through nearly the entire structure opens it up quite a bit.

So they basically want downtowns? Great let's fix that problem rahther than continuing to create artificial shopping locations.

Half of the reason I go to Westfield Mall is because of the food court.

If it was the standard mcdonalds-unrecognisable foodcourt chicken with different sauce-etc, I would hate it.

Westfield is a mall brand/company. There isn't just ONE Westfield mall.

Yep, we have Easton Town Centre around here (Columbus). It was one of the first of its kind, I believe and is very nice and a great place just to hang out.

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