A few weeks back, The New Yorker interviewed real estate magnate cum convicted felon Alfred Taubman. The topic was what makes a successful shopping center. He repeated a number of oft cited maxims, one of which is that you can’t get people to go more than two stories vertically. And that you need to create a circuit. I stopped in The Shops at Time Warner Center, and it seems they don’t have a subscription to The New Yorker.
Back in school a professor gave a short presentation of his professional work. It consisted mostly of the canopy at the Credit Lyonnais building (1301 Avenue of the Americas). It is an exemplary sample of the work SOM does: well detailed, solid, a little vainglorious and expensive. The professor marvelled at the fact that he worked there a year, and it was his only project. He estimated it was north of $2 million to construct (this was the late 80’s). When you see it, you can believe it. It’s a lot of stainless. And for you fussy formalists, he admitted sheepishly that even though they spent much of their time trying to express the relationship between the center spine (it is an vee shape, that also rises slightly along the perpendicular axis to the spine of the vee) and the two wings, in fact, it was cantilevered uniformly along the transverse axis, making all the careful detailing only overdone decoration. It’s an instructive thing to visit before the TW Center.
What one is stuck without throughout is the incredible detailing and attention to material use. Stores are clearly delineated by distinct materials, every surface has been considered and slathered in stainless, stone, marble, polished wood and lord knows what else. The undersides of the upper walkways have been treated with more care than entire suburbs of Houston. It reeks of desperation, of trying to make you forget some aspiring Virginny boy (Reston, no less) came to the big city, convinced some rich girl’s daddy to marry off his dowdy but well-mannered daughter, and then the carpetbagger decided to build the biggest apartment on the Upper West Side in hopes of buying some respect. If I tried a little harder, I’m sure I could paste an Gatsby analogy on here somewhere.
But we’re getting distracted. There is a mall in here somehwere. And that’s not so easy to determine, since the country mouse was afraid to consort with the shady classes, even those with sage words about how to seperate the gullible and their money. The main entrance has been raved about because of it has the largest something-something glass wall in the world. I’d give more props to it, but it’s basiscally a big window that looks into a relatively small lobby that delivers two crucial pieces of information to the new New Yorker: Whole Foods downstairs, and Williams & Sonoma straight ahead. If successful retailing is about location, then these folks went down to the crossroads and came back with a plan that resulted in a convincing the average pedestrian that this 700-foot monolith only contains two things: foodstuffs and precious earthenware in which to serve said food.
The entry hall intersects with a transverse hall that runs in a arc that mirrors Columbus Circle, and is anchored by Coach, Pink, and Hugo Boss. Above, several bridges indicate some activity on an upper level (how many is not made clear by any means). There are two (three, if you count the elevator bank to the Food Court- oh, I’m sorry, the Collection, which is what you name a food court inhabited by Thomas Kellner) paths to other levels: a gap (that reads a much larger than it actually is) in the entry floor that seems destined to suck all shoppers down into the inferno of the monopoly hippie-food purveyor, Whole Foods. Williams & Sonoma, which is directly behind, is straddled by escalators, but they are hardly inviting, and there is no visual connector to where they land. The front of W&S is broad and inviting, and it certainly seems if you managed to make it past Whole Foods, then this is where one ends up.
The net effect is that of an airport shopping complex: retail has been included is this behemoth, but only to make you feel like you aren’t in a complete loser venue. Traffic belies this. Even though the above stores are joined by Tumi, Godiva, Crabtree & Evelyn, Cole Haan, Morgenthal Fredericks, Stuart Weitzman, Face, and several others (18 in total), on a holiday Friday (not the best Friday for shopping), I counted about 65 patrons total, exclusive of Whole Foods and W&S.
I could wonder about what was upstairs, but I doubt it matters. I could speculate on whether those ground floor spaces are dog properties (I doubt it), but, in the end, there are two considerations: is it successful, ‘architecturally’ or as a business? I don’t particularly worry about the business prospects of purveyors of thousand dollar clutches, but since we already have two major, and several minor, shopping districts in this city that are only slighly less compact and feature more variety and exclusivity, why I, or one, wouldn’t simply go to SoHo or Madison Avenue, is beyond me. As for the architectural: there was no chance. The place has been detailed beyond belief by armies of Yale and GSD grads like my professor. But the parts don’t make a whole. How could they? There are four competing programs for ground floor space (and the Jazz at Someplace complex hasn’t been added yet). It’s dank due to the siting (the big window faces east, insuring the most stunning vistas will be available only to the morning maintenance crew, and the tiny footprint of the stores undermines the generous double and triple height hallways they face). There very notion of mixed use is a shaky concept created by developers. A city, by definition, is mixed use. Why someone needed to to prove (or try to) that Tyson’s Corner could be plunked down into Manhattan and work is beyond me. Take this bit of service journalism to heart: the is no reason to go there. Ever. Unless you just have to eat at Per Se. Then, use the side door.
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The Mall- er, Shops, at TW Center.
A few weeks back, The New Yorker interviewed real estate magnate cum convicted felon Alfred Taubman. The topic was what makes a successful shopping center. He repeated a number of oft cited maxims, one of which is that you can’t get people to go more than two stories vertically. And that you need to create a circuit. I stopped in The Shops at Time Warner Center, and it seems they don’t have a subscription to The New Yorker.
Back in school a professor gave a short presentation of his professional work. It consisted mostly of the canopy at the Credit Lyonnais building (1301 Avenue of the Americas). It is an exemplary sample of the work SOM does: well detailed, solid, a little vainglorious and expensive. The professor marvelled at the fact that he worked there a year, and it was his only project. He estimated it was north of $2 million to construct (this was the late 80’s). When you see it, you can believe it. It’s a lot of stainless. And for you fussy formalists, he admitted sheepishly that even though they spent much of their time trying to express the relationship between the center spine (it is an vee shape, that also rises slightly along the perpendicular axis to the spine of the vee) and the two wings, in fact, it was cantilevered uniformly along the transverse axis, making all the careful detailing only overdone decoration. It’s an instructive thing to visit before the TW Center.
What one is stuck without throughout is the incredible detailing and attention to material use. Stores are clearly delineated by distinct materials, every surface has been considered and slathered in stainless, stone, marble, polished wood and lord knows what else. The undersides of the upper walkways have been treated with more care than entire suburbs of Houston. It reeks of desperation, of trying to make you forget some aspiring Virginny boy (Reston, no less) came to the big city, convinced some rich girl’s daddy to marry off his dowdy but well-mannered daughter, and then the carpetbagger decided to build the biggest apartment on the Upper West Side in hopes of buying some respect. If I tried a little harder, I’m sure I could paste an Gatsby analogy on here somewhere.
But we’re getting distracted. There is a mall in here somehwere. And that’s not so easy to determine, since the country mouse was afraid to consort with the shady classes, even those with sage words about how to seperate the gullible and their money. The main entrance has been raved about because of it has the largest something-something glass wall in the world. I’d give more props to it, but it’s basiscally a big window that looks into a relatively small lobby that delivers two crucial pieces of information to the new New Yorker: Whole Foods downstairs, and Williams & Sonoma straight ahead. If successful retailing is about location, then these folks went down to the crossroads and came back with a plan that resulted in a convincing the average pedestrian that this 700-foot monolith only contains two things: foodstuffs and precious earthenware in which to serve said food.
The entry hall intersects with a transverse hall that runs in a arc that mirrors Columbus Circle, and is anchored by Coach, Pink, and Hugo Boss. Above, several bridges indicate some activity on an upper level (how many is not made clear by any means). There are two (three, if you count the elevator bank to the Food Court- oh, I’m sorry, the Collection, which is what you name a food court inhabited by Thomas Kellner) paths to other levels: a gap (that reads a much larger than it actually is) in the entry floor that seems destined to suck all shoppers down into the inferno of the monopoly hippie-food purveyor, Whole Foods. Williams & Sonoma, which is directly behind, is straddled by escalators, but they are hardly inviting, and there is no visual connector to where they land. The front of W&S is broad and inviting, and it certainly seems if you managed to make it past Whole Foods, then this is where one ends up.
The net effect is that of an airport shopping complex: retail has been included is this behemoth, but only to make you feel like you aren’t in a complete loser venue. Traffic belies this. Even though the above stores are joined by Tumi, Godiva, Crabtree & Evelyn, Cole Haan, Morgenthal Fredericks, Stuart Weitzman, Face, and several others (18 in total), on a holiday Friday (not the best Friday for shopping), I counted about 65 patrons total, exclusive of Whole Foods and W&S.
I could wonder about what was upstairs, but I doubt it matters. I could speculate on whether those ground floor spaces are dog properties (I doubt it), but, in the end, there are two considerations: is it successful, ‘architecturally’ or as a business? I don’t particularly worry about the business prospects of purveyors of thousand dollar clutches, but since we already have two major, and several minor, shopping districts in this city that are only slighly less compact and feature more variety and exclusivity, why I, or one, wouldn’t simply go to SoHo or Madison Avenue, is beyond me. As for the architectural: there was no chance. The place has been detailed beyond belief by armies of Yale and GSD grads like my professor. But the parts don’t make a whole. How could they? There are four competing programs for ground floor space (and the Jazz at Someplace complex hasn’t been added yet). It’s dank due to the siting (the big window faces east, insuring the most stunning vistas will be available only to the morning maintenance crew, and the tiny footprint of the stores undermines the generous double and triple height hallways they face). There very notion of mixed use is a shaky concept created by developers. A city, by definition, is mixed use. Why someone needed to to prove (or try to) that Tyson’s Corner could be plunked down into Manhattan and work is beyond me. Take this bit of service journalism to heart: the is no reason to go there. Ever. Unless you just have to eat at Per Se. Then, use the side door.