James Wines of SITE, BEST Store - Inside-Out Building, Milwaukee, WI, 1984
nickkahler reblogged
Carson David Brown, Mass, 2015 (via laughing)
Source: Laughing Squid
The highways have mutated their host cities. Sunbelt subdivisions follow their paths. Bedroom communities sprout at their exits. They've sown shopping malls and big-box stores, midwifed satellite business districts, sired factories, shipping centers, entire towns. They spawn traffic even as they relieve it, much as mountains create their own weather; over time they become utterly codependent with the territory through which they pass.
Earl Swift, "On the Inevitable Perpetuation of the US Interstate System," 2014 (via atlantic)
'In this speculative proposal, the spatial logics of two existing suburban typologies – the big box store and the single-family developer house - are recombined to generate new programmatic potentials. The dwellings migrate to occupy the vast horizontal roofscapes of the big boxes, while the repetitive system of the big box store’s open-span structure, aisles and storage racks establishes the linear organization of the houses above. Storage structures extrude through the inhabitable roof plane of the big box, delineating property divisions within the alternating pattern of houses and yards above and providing a container for the equipment and commodities of domestic life. In this hybrid of house and store, the identities of both are maintained, but in an altered form—now cross-wired to produce unanticipated social and spatial relationships through their mutual influence. In New Suburbanism, the logic of suburbia is exploited, wasteful redundancies are resolved, and new sectional matings are established in continued pursuit of the American Dream.'
Any kid who grew up in the city before the arrival of McDonald’s and the “big box” stores selling books, beds and bath towels can tell you how strange a first trip to a shopping mall was. For us, shopping was synonymous with striding through the city. One day we could cruise a Fifth Avenue department store, just like Lauren Bacall in a career-gal movie, and later spend hours in an Eighth Street bookshop, displaying a genuine interest in the poetry of Allen Ginsberg. In the city our shopping opportunities had history. We never chose a restaurant because it looked like other restaurants. We chose it because it was different.
IKEA was founded in 1943 by 17-year-old Ingvar Kamprad in Sweden. Currently, the company is owned by a Dutch-registered foundation that is believed to be controlled by the Kamprad family. IKEA is an acronym comprising the initials of the founder's name (Ingvar Kamprad), the farm where he grew up (Elmtaryd), and his home parish (Agunnaryd, in Småland, South Sweden). Older IKEA stores are usually very large blue buildings with few windows and yellow accents (the company's colors are also the national colors of Sweden). They are often designed around a "one-way" layout which leads customers along "the long natural way." This layout is designed to encourage the customer to see the store in its entirety (as opposed to a traditional retail store, which allows a consumer to go right to the section where the goods and services needed are displayed) although there are often shortcuts to other parts of the showroom. The sequence first involves going through furniture showrooms making note of selected items. Newer IKEA stores, like the one in Mönchengladbach, Germany, make more use of glass, both for aesthetic and functional reasons. Skylights are also now common in the Self-serve warehouses. More natural light reduces energy costs, improves worker morale and gives a better impression of the product.