Julia Yu

Julia Yu

We entered the mall through the Dartmouth and Stuart Street entrance, where there is a set of revolving doors. (Every outside entrance/exit to the mall had a set of revolving doors, as did one side of each pedestrian sky bridge. I suppose this is to control congestion, should it occur in the mall.) The Copley Place shopping center was highly geometric in its design, with a lot of large cylindrical white supports arranged in triangular shapes (depicted in a kind of sectional way in my map, as I found them interesting). The mall had multiple levels, which seemed to have an effect on the amount of natural light that could reach the ground floor (where we walked). I thought this was handled most interestingly in the area with the waterfall. It was an open space shaped like a polygon with many sides. Looking up, you could see one floor with more shops as well as a level above it that seemed just to be decorative glass. Each floor was shaped slightly differently so that an upper floor did not overhang the one below it so as to restrict its light. Mall patrons, however, did not seem to be utilizing the space as an area to pause - there was a strange smell, perhaps from the coins thrown into the waterfall, that was present, and people did not seem to want to linger on the benches.

The Prudential mall, being only one floor of shops, was much more generous with its light. Even the transition between the two malls was distinct; Copley had a dark hallway that ended in a lit area, almost drawing us into the pedestrian walkway that led to the Prudential mall. It instantly felt different - there was a great deal of lush greenery that created almost a greenhouse feel. The pedestrian traffic was also much greater in this area. In both buildings, the floor tiles had a distinct pattern - a lighter tile in the middle of the walkway, and a darker tile on the edges. This might be to guide mall patrons towards the middle of the walkway. The starkest difference between the two areas was definitely the light - the Prudential mall was much better lit with its pitched glass roof.

Newbury Street had a much more particular demographic than the mall, which seemed fairly diverse. There were fewer very old and very young people, and people were predominantly white or Asian. We assumed that the upper levels would be largely residential; when we climbed up a fire escape for a roof view, however, we found that the upper level of one building was actually some kind of fashion school office. In my map we only marked the clearly residential buildings as residential; some of the buildings are left uncertain because we thought they might be some kind of gallery or office space. All of the street-level entrances were commercial, but only one large business (Cole Haan, on the far right) seemed to occupy the upper levels as well. Similar to the mall, all of the businesses could be accessed from one level. The sidewalk was very wide, as was the street, which had unidirectional traffic. It seems in some ways that the Prudential mall is imitating Newbury Street and not vice versa, as it is planted in a similar way.