Everything about Copley Place screams upscale. From the sign out in front of the mall in the mini-plaza to the advertisements everywhere for the mall itself, as one of many Simon malls, to the fancy salmon-colored stone stairs to the shiny gold elevators and the waterfall in the middle of the atrium, not to mention the glass ceilings that allow for a ton of natural light in the small space in the city. The walkways are fairly wide, with a consistent stone pattern. There are few kiosks. Each store has its own exterior wall finish; the walls of the mall itself are not visible until you go down the path towards the restrooms and the parking. All of these spatial factors are reinforced by the signage. There is a code of conduct posted at the bottom of the escalator, a sign welcoming guests in seven different languages, and free Boston Common magazines in the center of the mall. All of this makes Copley Place enjoyable and accessible to only a certain type of customer: one with money to burn and a strong desire to shop. There aren’t many people milling about and the windows aren’t really big enough to permit for window shopping. Newbury Street is entirely different in character. The sidewalks are bustling with people, including those working the street for their causes. This kind of political advocacy is explicitly banned in Copley Place. The stores are a mixture of retail and grocery/general goods stores. What makes this street clearly commercial is the uniformity of it all. The buildings are all the same height, and often the same red brick with matching roofs. Trees are planted a specific distance apart. There is ample sidewalk room and trash bins, as well as lights for night. Once one steps off Newbury, the buildings again soar to higher, differing heights, the buildings aren’t made of brick anymore and there aren’t trees lining the one-way street.
After understanding that the objective is to attempt to make an argument about the space of study, I really focused on elements regarding the way people behave and interact in these locations. For Copley Place I immediately noticed that it is low population density and very elegant. The stores had security guards and there were also mall guards. The primary language heard in this location was english, and the movement of people was limited. People also carried fewer bags from their purchases in this location. This varied greatly with Prudential Center. Prudential center had a lot of people walking in a small area. The population density was way higher. More tourists(foreign languages spoken) were evident. People also came to shop in greater amounts as people had more bags. Security did not seem to be as prevalent. Finally, in mapping Newbury Street, I decided to map the amount of trash cans and fancy cars. The stores are literally located in the urban landscape. The trash cans in excess help reduce trash and maintain a pleasing location. I also abstractly depicted population density by creating a bell curve showing the population density on each segment of the street.
I began my observatory journey at the Galleries at Copley place at Dartmouth and Stuart Streets with my eyes and ears open. I noticed the stores within Copley Plan to be very high end and accordingly protected with security guards watching for shoplifters and photographers. The tile floor was laid out in a way that kept foot traffic moving just as a two way road. The old fashion, yet elegant marble floors on other parts of the walkways aligned with the upscale stores. There was a noticeable lack of natural light in this space - maybe something they are addressing in the current construction. As I moved on through the footbridge to the Presidential Center Mall- I felt a different energy. For one, I became very warm due to the inflow of natural sunlight. I did my best to portray these open ceilings and facades in my drawing. I found Prudential Center to be much busier with professionals on their lunch/coffee breaks, tourists, moms with toddlers. There were less security guards and more inviting storefronts and employees promoting samples. Exits to streets are very well marked on signage. Many benches and the large foodcourt provide great seating and meeting places. I walked through during the lunch hour and the place was bustling. The Newbury Street commercial area between Gloucester and Dartmouth had a different feel and look for a few obvious reasons. Newbury Street feels less like a mall and more like a neighborhood. However, signage, advertisements, window displays, etc. help to reveal that it is indeed a commercial space. While I am not positive, it seems as though there are many apartments above the store levels. Many stores have advertisements and mannequins in the windows and signs on the sidewalks to replicate the experience of a shopping mall. However, the signage is all very uniform and understated- probably due to city restrictions of type, height, size and brightness of signage to preserve the historic nature of the area.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.