Yigit Sezener

Yigit Sezener

Newbury street offers a very unique shopping experience that is at once very similar to that of a shopping mall, but also carries with it great discrepancies. The first aspect of Newbury street that is mall-like is the continuous stream of un-interrupted shopping locales. Unlike many other shopping streets in the world, this particular segment of Newbury Street is not interrupted with residential settlements or eateries. Furthermore much like the uniform facade of shop-fronts in a wall, Newbury Street offers the same uniformity on the facade of it’s buildings. Each building is adorned with a Neo-Georgian pointy roof and the entrance to each building is through a wrought-iron post-industrial bridge. This is the part where Newbury Street differs from a mall, in the sense that every shop has an extended entrance and sometimes it is even confusing to figure out which bridge leads to which shop!

Contrastingly Copley Center offers a much less confusing shopping experience. It is built as a series of narrow pathways that lead up to great big spaces that contain shops and offer an open floor plan that allows the shopper to see other floor. This combined with the massive waterfall in the middle creates a sense of commotion, movement and bustling the mall even on a very non-busy today. If the floor plan wasn’t this open and the levels layered the mall would feel much less crowded; which is an interesting contrast to Newbury which always feels like it’s crowded and bustling due it being a narrow street.