Welcome Letter and Introduction to the Project
Greetings!

The very mention of Strip Malls tends to incite disregard, if not outright disdain—particularly among people accustomed to the main streets of mid-western towns or the urban cores of east-coast cities. Yet in the west, and in post-war suburbs across the country, Strip Malls are a fact of life. They are ubiquitous and familiar to the point of invisibility; they are the wallflowers of thousands of streetscapes that millions of people travel daily. I cannot grab a cup of coffee, buy a loaf of decent bread or have a good ethnic meal without going to a Strip Mall. When I first moved to Phoenix, the Valley’s sea of Strip Malls seemed to me a strange and slightly melancholic artifact, lovingly eccentric yet annoyingly ugly. After a while, I just became numb.

This competition, Flip a Strip, asks how we can reject numbness. How might we re-think and newly envision the potential of the Strip Mall (a building stock of which we have a cross-continental abundance)? With collective energy and creative design expertise, we know there are many ways to transcend the non-descript status quo of the Strip Mall—ways that are aesthetically compelling, economically feasible and communally smart. What models, complementary mixed-usages and social experiences might result? This project hopes to inspire city planners, developers and entrepreneurs here and elsewhere. It is a call to action.

Flip a Strip is a showcase for architectural talent as well as an idea-generator: it seeks to highlight useful and innovative concepts for the sustainable re-use of Strip Malls and to launch productive public dialog about the potential of good design and civic engagement.

The competition continues the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art’s practice of addressing prescient topics through the unique forum of the museum, where ideas take shape as tangible objects. The project grew out of several random conversations whose participants deserve due credit since, for one reason or another, they are disqualified from the fun part--and all would rather be designers than consultants. Chuck Albright nudged the idea of a competition along at home, by example. Mike Medici, SMoCA Board member and president of SmithGroup (a project sponsor), and Scott O’Connor, principal of SteepleRock Ventures and a member of the Advisory Committee, were the first ad-hoc test-market at a cocktail party, and approved the name. Their enthusiasm and input moved things forward, as did pivotal early conversations with Dr. Nan Ellin, associate professor, School of Public Affairs, Arizona State University, Tempe, whose expertise and involvement has bred critical, thoughtful dialog in this community.

Flip a Strip is an opportunity to transform a modern building type for the 21st century. We hope you will be inspired to turn this suburban cliché inside out.

Sincerely,

Susan Krane
Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art

Challenge

Welcome to Flip a Strip, a design competition sponsored by the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art [SMoCA] that targets for architectural remediation one of America’s least loved suburban building typologies—the Strip Mall.

As SMoCA Director Susan Krane points out in her letter, the Strip Mall is such a ubiquitous form in post-war American cities—and generally of such poor architectural quality—that to a degree they recede into the landscape altogether. Viewed at 40 miles-per-hour, they become the wallpaper of our suburban rooms. And unfortunately, like so much wallpaper, they are often faded, peeling, and uneven in their application. At the same time, these little retail enclaves provide important services: their convenience markets, gas stations, and fast-food outlets have replaced the corner store and the diner. This is where the dry cleaners, the shoe repair shop, and the 5-and-Dime (now called the “Dollar Store”) have migrated. Added together, Strip Malls are important economic generators, part of a vast, delicate retail web that makes centerless suburbia possible. Architecturally, we may not like living with them, but we sure can’t live without them, either.

Flip a Strip aims to correct the first part of that indictment by asking participants to imagine higher and better interpretations of the Strip Mall. The focus is on recycling, repurposing, reinvention, and rejuvenation rather than on replacement. Entrants are asked to choose one of three pre-selected strip centers in metropolitan Phoenix and suggest improvements. What those might be is up to the designers, but the competition is not simply seeking a prettier strip. Instead, entrants should propose changes that reconsider–without rejecting altogether–the notion of the Strip Mall. To that end, any proposed solution must retain the retail activities and the existing buildings as part of a profit-making enterprise: You can change it, you can add to it, you can alter the mix, but you can’t tear it down.

Entries will be judged in two stages, the first of which will consider the technical and economic viability of the proposals; architectural quality will be evaluated separately, by a different set of jurors. Projects that are deemed economically unfeasible will move forward to the architectural jury at a substantial disadvantage. Thus competitors are strongly encouraged to structure their teams with individuals who have demonstrated development and economic expertise.

This emphasis on economic reality is not intended to hamstring competitors. Instead, it is aimed at encouraging proposals that could result in real change for this and many other cities. Greater Phoenix, with more than 3.5 million people spread over hundreds of square miles of desert floor, is the quintessential American postwar metropolis. It is vast, growing rapidly, and architecturally uniform. Strip Malls define nearly every major intersection in the city, and many mid-block locations as well. They come in a variety of shapes and sizes, but most are architecturally undistinguished, and nearly all are set back from the street (sometimes by several hundred feet) behind asphalt parking lots. In most places, they offer little, if any landscaping. Despite these less-than-desirable architectural characteristics, Strip Malls are often economically very efficient. They regularly translate parcels of land that might otherwise be difficult to develop into tidy little financial islands. They can easily represent the apotheosis of minimal investment yielding reasonable return, a formulation that appeals to many investors.

Thus, Flip a Strip is interested in proposals that maintain economic viability yet offer more creative urban and architectural opportunities. Could there be mixed use? What kind of civic functions might be possible? What does a Strip Mall want to be when it grows up? This competition requires that a developer (whether private or public) be able to build, manage, and maintain what you are proposing at reasonable cost—and also be able to derive income that would create a desirable return on investment in a time frame typical of real estate development. In short, we want real proposals, not eye-candy. On the other hand, you should feel free to push envelopes.

Economic sustainability is, of course, only part of the challenge. Proposals must also be of the highest architectural and urban quality, and should set standards for environmental sensitivity. Sustainable building practices will only become more important in the future. Competitors should demonstrate that this building type can incorporate these technologies as well as any other.

Flip a Strip is a hybrid competition. Roughly twenty firms will be invited to participate, while the majority of entries will be received through an open call for submissions. All projects will be juried blind, and no team—either invited or self-submitted—will be identified to the jury until after all the submissions have been reviewed and winners identified. The competition will result in a major exhibition at SMoCA in Fall 2008. The show will be accompanied by a website, and may also include a bound publication. The three top entries will receive cash prizes and the jury may elect to distinguish a number of entries with Honorable Mentions.

Competitors should read this competition brief thoroughly, and direct any questions to the address listed under Q&A. We wish you the best of luck.

Overview

The story of the Strip Mall, like that of so much of 20th century American (sub)urban development, is in many respects merely a chapter in the rise of the economic and physical hegemony of the automobile. After all, people have shopped in congregated retail environments for most of recorded history, in the West dating back at least to the times of the Greek Agora and Roman Forum. But American automobility, with its seemingly inexorable centripetal force, offered—and demanded—new retail patterns, just as it reshaped the residential landscape. Yet where the car took traditional, dense urban neighborhoods and atomized them, retail quarters, though also transformed, would retain certain familiar characteristics.

At the beginning of the automobile era, most Americans did their shopping along Main Street: a corridor in the economic center of every city and town, regardless of population, defined by a wall of merchants whose doors and display windows faced the street. In small towns, those buildings might be one or two floors high, often with large signs that ran above the eave line for the full length—and often another entire floor—of the building. In bigger cities, the stores were the first level of multi-story buildings that housed either business or residential above. Larger cities might also have more than one commercial district. Generally, Main Street (no matter what its actual name) had shops on both sides of the road, or arrayed around a public square. Before cars, people tied their horses to hitches along the street in lines that resemble the storefront parking of today. At the dawn of the auto age, horses and cars often jockeyed for resting positions.

But by the 1920s, cars ceased to be a novelty, and began to grow as much in power and size as they did in numbers. Main Street grew increasingly congested, and dangerous. Cities responded by installing signage, hiring more traffic cops, widening streets, and creating more parking. At the same time, as urban areas across the country began to grow along their perimeters (aided ironically by better designed and operated modes of public transit), new retail strips began to form—more haphazardly organized, perhaps, but increasingly busy nevertheless. Generally concentrated along streetcar (and later bus) lines, these new linear commercial zones were the fore-runners of modern Strip Malls, though that’s not how their developers conceived them: at the time, the buildings lining the sides of the new transit corridors were known as “taxpayers,” a name derived from the developer’s intention to erect just enough building on each site to offset the land’s taxes until anticipated later demand would allow a larger development to proceed. In many regards, these Taxpayers, often housing several retail establishments, were the direct precursors to the contemporary Strip center. (For an excellent description of the Taxpayer Strip and automobile retail in general, see Chester Liebs’ fascinating and thorough From Main Street to Miracle Mile: American Roadside Architecture, Little, Brown and Company, 1985). With them came such “innovations” as store-provided parking (in back, on the side, and, inevitably, in front of the stores). Once the first clever merchant set his Taxpayer back behind a dozen off-street parking spaces, the familiar urban pattern of Main Street’s continuous frontage was broken, and it would be decades before anyone would try to restore it.

The pull of the perimeter and the creation of the Taxpayer dealt Main Street two lethal blows, and a third—the modern shopping center—was on the way. It would take another 50 years to complete, but the death march of Main Street had begun.

Accounts differ somewhat as to where the shopping center was born. Some credit the Taxpayer Strip, and as noted above, they certainly transformed the retail environment. But at their heart, Taxpayers were more an early form of land-banking than they were an active retail strategy. Shopping Centers, on the other hand, were developed with the intention of luring retailers out of the city centers (away from Main Street) and into a new suburban format. And while several developers toyed with concepts that offered interesting departures from the norm, most historians credit developer J.C. Nichols of Kansas City, Missouri with pioneering the suburban shopping center when in 1922, he created Country Club Plaza, 6 miles east of downtown. Nichols envisioned “the Plaza” not just as a shopping district, but as the economic center for a large new residential community he was developing, with businesses and retail mixed together in a picturesque Mediterranean Revival style. The Plaza was the first center to bring large and small scale retailers together in the same place, supplemented by restaurants, theaters, and entertainment, a variety of commercial and professional offices, and Nichols may be the first person to use the term “shopping center” to describe his new building type. The Plaza was revolutionary, and remains a thriving shopping area to this day, with most of its original architectural character intact.

Nevertheless, Nichols’ vision retained one of the key elements of Main Street: retail facing the street. In one of his most remarkable and prescient decisions, Nichols secreted the automobile away in large structured parking garages and carefully screened surface lots (most of which were intended for—and eventually became—later development sites). Part of the reason the Plaza remains so popular is its distinctly pedestrian character.

It would take several more iterations to create the hermetic, internalized regional shopping centers we know today. Architect Victor Gruen, generally regarded as the godfather of the modern shopping mall, originally regarded his work as the creation of indoor agoras, or the logical evolution of the typology begun by Giuseppe Mengoni in Milan, Italy in his 1877 Galleria Vittorio Emanuelle (he later decried the donut-hole pattern of the regional shopping mall surrounded by a sea of parking). Whether such self-flattery is justified depends upon one’s view of these sorts of projects, but one thing is certain: Gruen and nearly every retail architect after him has maintained the character of the original Main Streets and Strip Centers: their malls are axial retail grids surrounding internal “streets.”

The contemporary Strip Mall is a hybrid between the vision of J. C. Nichols and the reality of the Taxpayer. Like the Taxpayers, the strip centers follow the geography of suburban development. But like the Plaza, they have multiple stores and are generally purpose-built. One of the first, and most influential, was Columbus, Ohio’s Grandview Avenue Shopping Center, developed in 1928 by Don Casto. Anchored by no less than 4 grocery stores (including Piggly Wiggly, Kroger, A & P, and Polumbo’s), the center featured some 20 other shops and off-street parking for 400 cars. The grocery stores are important, as they too were undergoing a metamorphosis at the time, from small-footprint, mom-and-pop operations, to the early stages of the mass merchandizing of food (and home) products. Over the decades, grocers have remained a staple of strip centers. Another consistent tenant has been the convenience retailer: the dry cleaner, the repair shop, the prepared food purveyor, and in latter days, the entertainment retailer (video, music, etc.).

Casto’s Grandview was succeeded by literally tens of thousands of such centers in cities across the country. In many of the nation’s postwar cities, particularly in the west and south, the Strip Mall is one of the most consistent fixtures on the urban landscape. Several distinct strip typologies have arisen: L-shaped, with and without “pads” (small development parcels located in the parking lots of the center), the single strip, two story strips, corner strips, mid-block strips, etc. The strip is ubiquitous in part because of the flexibility it offers in its retail mix and form, and because it can be adapted to nearly any kind of site larger than an acre or so. It is also an investment vehicle that can offer relatively easy entry into the world of real estate development: a simple three acre strip with 4 stores and parking is much more in reach of the would-be Donald Trump than is a 500-acre regional shopping mall.

However, not all Strip Malls are created equal, and though some offer a ticket to economic prosperity, not all survive. Times and tastes change; neighborhoods trend up and down; retailing evolves, and cities are regularly left with declining or deserted strip centers that are visual eyesores. Repurposing them is neither impossible nor uncommon: a former Strip Mall in Las Cruces, New Mexico now offers branch offices of the state government. A lively church has repurposed a declining New Orleans strip. Arizona State University annexed a Strip Mall in Tempe and used it for everything from teacher’s offices to classrooms. What becomes of the Strip Mall that no longer turns a profit is the subject of this competition, which looks at three centers in the metropolitan Phoenix area that are ripe for reconsideration.

(Information on the history of shopping malls is widely available on the web and in libraries. Much of the information for this article is taken from research compiled by shopping center trade groups, various magazines and journals, and websites devoted to shopping mall history).