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To obfuscate the mass-produced spatial template at their heart, many shopping malls distinguished themselves by branding their internalized worlds with fantastical architectural imagery culled from the globe to create an immersive surface language that heightened the experience of consumption.
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Predictability was as much about the replication of profit as it was about guarantees of an anxiety free experience. Spatial formulas such as the dumb-bell served to manipulate the movements of the consumer. It consisted of a single internal shopping street with two large ‘anchor stores’ acting as ‘magnets’ at either end of the route, achieving a balance between plan and profit that has underscored the shopping mall’s physical form ever since. The most fundamental of these was a devastatingly simple plan form christened the ‘dumb-bell’. Many of Gruen’s innovations remain prevalent today. Victor Gruen’s major book ‘Shopping Towns USA’, published in 1960, served as the benchmark for shopping mall design. If the shopping mall thrived by removing the perceived threat of the urban realm, however, it also impinged upon its freedoms. Theoretically the shopping mall offered the convenience, comfort and security that the urban realm could not. Validation of the suburban mall was derived in opposition to the congestion, confusion and threat implicit within the traditional urban core. Moreover, this choice was coupled to perceptions of the motor car as a symbol of suburban freedom. As a convenient lifestyle choice that concentrated desirable elements of consumption within a single protective environment, the ‘classic’ American mall offered itself as an alternative to the city centre. Its classic suburban form, pioneered in post-war America, was seemingly a guarantor of financial success that locked the typology into a stasis of non-evolution.
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Over its brief life architects have struggled with the shopping mall. Keywords: Shopping Mall, China, Urban Regeneration, Suburbia, Cultural Hybridity, Architecture DOI: Can this blurring of cultural lines unravel the layers of existential meaning embodied within the modern British mall to provide a different kind of language with which designers may engage with this building type? Timely questions such as this must be addressed as the ‘second coming’ of the shopping mall, re-branded under the banner of ‘urban regeneration’, increasingly defines what happens in the centre of British cities today. Using Westfield in White City, the Westfield development at the 2012 Olympic site, the Liverpool One shopping centre and the redeveloped Bull Ring in Birmingham as UK case studies, I will draw attention to how the typology is evolving as a culturally hybrid proposition borne of insights drawn from its Eastern counterparts. There, the shopping mall has become a cornerstone of a new urbanity, representing a typological leap from the historic suburban models of mall design established in much of the Western world. Accordingly, many architects have focused their interest on Far Eastern models of urban complexity drawn from the unprecedented urban expansion taking place in countries such as China, Singapore and Japan. Widely discredited as the ‘slayer’ of the high street, the suburban shopping mall has been cast aside as western development ideals shift toward a new so-called ‘urban renaissance’. The objective of this research is the formation of a critical position by which the repositioning of the British shopping mall from a suburban to an urban situation can be understood.