Award of Excellence Winner (1st)

Urban Battery, 2008
MOS
New Haven, Connecticut

Site: Scottsdale: 2200 N. Scottsdale Road (near Oak Street)
Design team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample with Ryan Culligan, Steven Gertner, James Tate, Jason Bond, Shu Chang, Kera Lagios (www.mos-office.net)
Estimated construction cost: $800,000
Features: "green" features, algae wall and rooftop algae ponds to generate alternative energy, bike paths and walking trails, community center

Although one's first impulse in rethinking the strip mall might be to address its isolation and ugliness, MOS chose instead to amplify the basic characteristic that defines the strip mall: its bare-bones economic efficiency. In MOS's words, the strip mall is "already perfect and abject." It efficiently provides shoppers with a quick and easy way to retrieve goods and quite beautifully does so with no apologies. The firm wanted to sustain the frank, lowbrow purpose of the strip mall, rather than "gentrify" the genre. No money or energy was wasted on ancillary services or aesthetic flourishes.

Urban Battery functions as an alternative, off-the-grid power station, vertical greenhouse and a billboard all at once. It produces energy on-site for the tenants of the strip mall, which it also shades from the sun. A system of wind turbines generates electricity from rising hot air--75,000 kWh per year. Thin glass channels house an algae wall that produces both gases for bio-fuel and filtered, clean air for the mall. The large supporting structure (measuring 300 by 300 feet yet only 25 feet deep) also functions as an intriguingly abstract billboard that advertises the strip mall's production of "green" energy--a radical move in a city with the strictest of billboard ordinances. The algae create an elegantly translucent, modulated green scrim, as they are cultivated at various points on the structural grid.

Urban Battery also addresses the energy systems of the community. By removing existing fences along the perimeter of the property and adding new bike and walking paths, MOS proposes a more porous site and encourages human locomotion by healthier means. A community center housed in the mall would enable further physical activity: dance and yoga classes, specific programs for cross-generational interaction. MOS sees Urban Battery as a solution that can be customized for other strip malls and thus repeated up and down main thoroughfares.

Thanks to Scott Bingham, Research Scientist, School of Life Sciences Arizona State University, Tempe; Prof. Charles Dismukes, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey; and Joel Rosenbaum Laboratory Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut for their special contributions to this project.