I was interested both in how this space in the mall complex seemed to function as a segue between the two malls and in how it delineated public vs. non-public spaces. In regards to the first point, I noticed that the two malls had very different "feels." Copley Place was muted in color (lots of beiges and browns) and sound (materials didn't cause a lot of echo and there were less people in general). It also tended to feel like Copley Place had pretty "definite" boundaries as to where mallgoers could enter if they did not intend to buy something--there were stern-looking people standing in the doorways of many stores. There were also few windows or doors into the outside world that were not "below" mallgoers, accessible only by stairs. In the Pru Mall, by contrast, the colors were brighter, the materials caused lots of echo, there were many more people, and the floor-plan seemed more convoluted. It also had higher ceilings and several arcades lined on one side by brick walls and on the other by glass, giving the impression that one was "outside." In this intermediate section, the colors were muted but not earth tones (as in Copley Place); there were high ceilings and many windows, but most of them were at least somewhat opaque; and the sound echoed, but was fairly dispersed. This section also seemed to serve as an intermediary between Copley Place's stricter delineation of public and non-public spaces and the general openness of the Prudential Center. One example of this that confused me at first is the seating area outside the Marriott lobby. The area is open to the public, but bound on three sides by areas that are not (a Marriott-affiliated restaurant, stairways to the Marriott lobby, and an aperture in the floor that overlooks the lobby itself). Its fourth side abuts the main public walkway, but is set off by opaque green panels. The area is darker than the mall walkway and contains stern-looking attendants. Apparently as a result of these features, mallgoers seemed tentative to enter this space; most of those who did appeared to be well-dressed businessmen. Because I found this public/private delineation so interesting in the mall, I also paid attention to it on Newbury Street. I found there that on one side of the street, the buildings were mostly unmarked (and apparently residential). On that side, there is a pretty clear delineation between public and private space: the sidewalk is public and the buildings are private. On the other side, where there are more commercial buildings, the distinction is less clear. Many of these shops and restaurants have patio space jutting out into the public sidewalk; while these spaces seem meant to invite people into the business, they also seem the opposite of inviting to non-customers. There are also spaces between these patios that are ostensibly open to the public, but people did not seem to venture into those spaces.
The Copley Place and Prudential Center malls and Newbury Street display a stark contrast in the different modes one can organize a retail center or area. First, Newbury is very open, with stores in townhouse style buildings along the street. I think the organization is interesting in its usage of space. As I show in my sketch, the entrances to the stores tend to alternate between having to go upstairs and downstairs. This maximizes the amount of land used, while still giving each shop an individual storefront. Additionally, the street is made more pleasant by the cohesiveness of the brick buildings and the trees planted orderly along the large sidewalk. The attractiveness of the street makes people want to spend more time in the area which leads to them shopping more. In contrast, the two malls are much more enclosed than Newbury Street. They go up several stories and have few windows. The bridge connecting the two malls allows shoppers to stay completely isolated from the outside world, while Newbury street is very much immersed in the city. Newbury is very “old Boston” while the malls are quite modern. In my sketch, I depicted an aerial view from the top of Copley Place. I thought the shape of the space was an interesting polygon. I also noticed the many different paths of shoppers but I could not really see the actual stores from that angle. I made my sketch a lot about the motion of the shopping rather than the specific stores.
These two spaces are vastly different. I take much more enjoyment of shopping on Newbury St than in the Prudential or Copley place shops. On Newbury there are trees lining the brick sidewalks, and there is a level of homogenous architecture of the shops. The building code seems to have been strictly enforced, resulting in a very pleasant aesthetic. There is a great mix of restaurants, fast food, and shops so that you can spend an entire day on the street and never have to leave. Though to live in one of the residential units on the street would be something of a tough environment. The one way streets in the area contribute to a rather difficult environment to flag down a taxi, and the accessibility from the Red Line is not great, you have to walk through Boston Common. Spending time in the mall is a much less pleasant experience. As a shopper you are stuck inside, where it can be noisy and hectic. There is ample signage to instruct your walking but unless you know where to look it is always confusing. There are so many different directions to go in that it can be disorienting. Especially in Copley Place, with it multi level facility. Everything is more forced. The population that is roaming the mall is there for a reason, they are there to shop. While on Newbury street you may have some locals coming by for a stroll, some dogs out on the street, some homeless population, you can find none of the diversity or ‘character’ in the overpasses of the mall. There is no one but driven shoppers looking for a deal. To make matters worse the mall contains more department stores which provide a larger less personal feel than the more boutique style shops of Newbury St.
I chose to represent the two locations on a variety of scales and perspectives, both geospatially and thematically, rather than as one all-encompassing vision. I wanted to maximize the amount of information to include a breadth of visions while retaining depth in details. At the malls, I focused my time at the waterfall area, a node for shoppers and stores, because I felt that it related well to our class’s focus on the built “natural” environment. I sketched the indoor equivalent to the “picturesque garden”, but I also was interested in how shoppers interacted with the meticulously-designed space as a whole, as most (but not all) seemed more focused on shopping than appreciative of the gardenesque oasis. I was also interested in observing what types of stores situated near this environment for economic or other reasons, and which would be on the second floor. I also counted the number of people in each store, but I visited the two locations late in the day, so I do not believe that this even gives a good indication of typical consumer patterns. While the malls felt expressly designed for shoppers’ convenience and enjoyment from the beginning, Newbury Street had more of an organic, while also more homogenous, layout. Although the inclusion of nature seemed to be more patterned (trees every 20 feet or so, more formal gardens) it didn’t seem like an architect had tried to maximize the amount of money and time spent by visitors. The buildings were likely converted rowhouses, giving a residential atmosphere. There were few places to sit (pointed stone barriers seem to discourage this) and the straight street and wide sidewalks are more conducive to window- shopping and mobility.
In Copley, the glass and brick create a distinct industrial or commercial atmosphere. The large glass panes that let you look inside the building. It helps that “Neiman Marcus” also boasts a giant sign indicating that the department store lies within. The walkway as well identifies the space as wholly commercial as a glass walkway between apartment buildings in a downtown area would be quite strange. The combination of buildings made of similar or identical striped brick unifies the whole commercial spaeces as belonging to one entity (Copley Mall). Finally, the map in the top left corner, which is placed in various places throughout the inside of the mall, shows the purely commercial use as well as the way in which the Prudential center (seen from afar from this entrance) is connected to the building. On Newbury street, the older buildings are much better integrated into the whole setting –it’s not a bunch of identical buildings but rather the original residential character of old downtown Boston shines through. That character is seen in the dimensionality as well as the different colors of buildings. What distinguishes the commercial from the residential spaces on Newbury Street to me are the differences in windows as well as the minimal signage that appears on some of the buildings. The windows are so interesting because the lower floors of the buildings, those used for retail, have large glass windows that take up the entire façade, letting customers see the wares inside. Old-fashioned signage and awnings show customers the names of the stores they may go into. A secondary structural element that maintains the residential character is the intact fire escapes that connect higher floors to the sidewalk as well as to other buildings (it seems). I tried to maintain those differences in my sketch despite not using color.
When thinking about the Prudential/Copley commercial center, the connecting hallways are the first features that come to mind. Although these paths do have stores off to their sides, they seem to be constructed, primarily, with the express purpose of keeping people moving. I came to realize how difficult it is for someone to turn around in the middle of one of these pathways and go back where they came from. What keeps people moving forward, I think, is the hope of a larger space, of more breathing room. And some of these spaces are either open atriums where people can sit down (in the case of Copley, with green spaces and even a small fountain) or larger, more brand-name stores or restaurants that encourage people to stick around for longer. I also really paid attention to empty spaces at the shopping centers, so much so that it made it the center of my sketch. Malls, at least to me, never seem to be fully completed—there’s always another further stage of development. This means that there are sections of the shopping centers that are almost completely deserted, even if there are stores lining up the paths. In Newbury Street, I noticed how one side of the street was under construction, leaving the other one looking, for the most part, untouched. It also seemed to me that the more commercial side of the street—the right-hand side, as portrayed in my map, seemed to have many more stores, while the left-hand side seems to be more residential in nature, even if there are stores at the ground and first levels.
The first thing that I noticed when I entered Copley Place was how expensive everything looked. From the tiling, to the gilded ceiling, and the expensive brand-name stores that I had always associated with affluence (Louis Vuitton, Jimmy Choo, Armani, etc.), I felt immediately out of place. And I looked out of place, as the man standing outside of one of the stores who forgot to ask me—and only me—if I wanted a free sample, could probably tell. The Prudential Center, however, was a stark difference. I found myself surrounded by stores that I could see myself, a not-very-well-off college student, shopping at. The atmosphere was more familiar, and it reminded me a lot more of the shopping mall I visited at home. There was a greater diversity of people: not just the old white people I found myself surrounded by at Copley, but diversity in race and age. While there is no literal barrier between Copley Place and the Prudential Center, there seems to be an unspoken agreement about who has access to what spaces. Money acts as the barrier between the two very different worlds, and this is what I wanted to highlight in my sketch. On Newbury Street, I found some similarity to Prudential Center in terms of monetary accessibility and diversity of populations. However, Newbury Street is not a shopping mall, but rather a street in the heart of Boston, and the architecture reflects this, with the stores woven into housing complexes and residential areas. Given that it is a residential area, I noticed a greater variety of stores on the street in comparison to either of the malls: more restaurants, creative/community spaces, self-care places, etc. This difference of Newbury Street as a residential area and community, rather than simply a shopping area, is reflected in my sketch.
I chose to look at the comparative pattern of kinds of stores (retail vs. service vs. food) versus the presence of public spaces in each kind of shopping district. On Newbury Street, the stores were much more equally divided between food and retail, while the indoor malls were almost entirely retail. But the indoor malls had public spaces like gardens, as well as benches upon which people could rest. Newbury Street had neither of those. This seems to suggest that food establishments (the restaurants, cafes and coffee shops that are so prevalent on Newbury) play a similar role in the environment of the shopping district to public spaces: both are a place for people to rest and take a break. Indoor malls don’t feel the need to provide the same number of food stores since they provide public spaces for relaxation, so they can maximize their number of retail stores without denying people a place to rest and therefore risking them getting fatigued and leaving. Newbury, without these public spaces, has to provide a higher number of food establishments in which people can rest, otherwise they would decrease the length of time people would be willing to shop. Also to take into consideration would be that the indoor malls had an overall designer, so there was a voice for public spaces, compared to every storefront looking out for themselves as they do on Newbury, and there being no overall designer to advocate for public space. It’s interesting as well that the malls spend money on extensive interior gardens and plants, while Newbury seems to rely on the natural outdoors to provide that “garden” feeling. It’s almost like a smaller-scale version of the Park movement: shopping moved indoors, so people tried to figure out how to bring nature with it.
Examining these two different commercial spaces was very interesting because it became evident how they were trying to imitate one another, but also how different they still were. To start, I went to the Prudential/Copley Malls, and I noticed that the use of glass both in storefronts and in the walls and ceilings was very prominent. This creates a fluid feel between indoors and outdoors to make the shoppers feel like they are in a more natural and less commercial, man-made space. The use of plants and large greenery in certain spaces also helps to achieve this natural feel, as does a large outdoor garden that can be clearly seen right outside the mall through large glass walls. The smaller signs hanging off many of the storefronts (which I tried to portray in my sketch) also give the feeling of walking down an outdoor street with small boutiques all in a row. The high, uneven, glass ceilings are also artfully constructed to blend in with the natural sky and give a very open feeling. The people in the space seem to mainly be there to shop and spend money in some way, whether that is in shops or in restaurants, but there are also a few gathering spaces with seating near the foliage and large windows. The entrances and exits to the mall are very streamlined because they are only in a few, designated spots, so it seems to attract people who are coming in with a purpose (and with money to spend). I then went Newbury Street and sat across from Shake Shack (between Fairfield and Exeter Streets) to observe that space. The commercial aspects of the space are comparable to the indoor mall because all of the stores are very close together, and they utilize the same large, glass storefronts to display goods and small signs hanging off the buildings with the store names. However, the interesting thing about Newbury Street is that it is very clearly a space used for activities other than commerce as well, so people just out walking with dogs or kids or friends are integrated with shoppers. The entrances and exits to the streets also reflect this inclusivity because they are much more decentralized than they are in the mall – you can enter and exit from many different side streets – so anyone, even those who are just passing through without any intention to spend money, can experience the space. There are also people hanging out and doing things they love like playing music on the street, which is actually in an attempt to make money rather than spend it. The obvious presence of cars and the sounds that accompany them also point out how different this space is from a mall and how much more integrated it is into the urban fabric, which differs from the man-made, disruptive indoor mall.
I'll admit that I thought what I was going to learn from this assignment was that street-level commerce produces a convivial, integrated atmosphere whereas enclosed galleries make for predictable, contrived shopping—an opposition implying that wholly privatized space isn't fun unless you're buying something. And while the palpable differences between Newbury Street and the Prudential/Copley mall complex do confirm this bias of mine, the reality is a bit more complicated. First, as I've tried to indicate by using arrows in my sketch, both portions of the mall are surprisingly well-designed, allowing for a seamless passage from the street to the galleries, from the galleries into skyscraper-encircled walking spaces, from these spaces into hotels, and so on. This dynamic topography offers an entertainment of its own—kind of like the Chelsea High Line—that the zero-incline linearity of Newbury street can't match. Similarly, the galleries seem to blend public amenities (bad statuary, ample seating) with private capital (the looming skyscrapers and hotel lobbies with “elite” check-ins) in a way that seems admirable, if strained. Don't get me wrong, though: the mall is deeply sinister—it just makes for a pleasant, I. M. Pei-esque walk. But while the mall adopts this mixed-use ethic to break up its commercial monotony, Newbury Street relies more on the shifting novelty of the street to do so, since even though it's a more organic space, it's still a parade of private interest. As I was trying to figure out how to sketch it, I realized that each section of each block followed nearly the same format: one store on the bottom, one on top, some apartments above that—then repeat with some variation. This, at least, applies to the formally commercial parts. Of course, there's another commerce in Newbury that's not so present in the mall: the economy of people and observing them. As I indicated in the "languages overheard" and "topics of conversation portion of my sketch," people seem to interact more freely and more loudly in Newbury. (In the mall, people seem slightly afraid to drown out the insipid, never-ending softcore jazz they are made to hear.) And while the mall has to advertise its cosmopolitanism—a message board reading Bienvenidos, Bem-Vindos, Willkommen, ようこそ, etc.—Newbury Street can't help but be cosmopolitan. A visitor with no knowledge of the conventions of American commercial spaces might find no aesthetic difference between Newbury and the mall, but she could certainly tell them apart by their sounds.