Building a Better Big Box

The Washington Post enlists the imaginations of several DC-area architects in envisioning the future of the "big box" retail spaces that we all know and loathe. What will happen when the anchor tenant moves on, goes under, or decides it needs an even bigger space? What about changing retail and transportation preferences?

The different solutions presented in the article approach big box retail space from a few angles--exploring the big box's integration into denser, urban form and reimagining its insides as space for agriculture and commerce.

Below, Christopher Leinberger and Daniel Rippeteau start with the ubiquitous parking lots that surround essentially every suburban big box store. Their solution: "build a town in the parking lot."

The vast acreage of big-box parking lots seems almost providentially proportioned to be turned into walkable city blocks, he says. What you have to do is lay these blocks out with parking garages at their core, and encrust those with an outer layer of shops and apartments on all sides. That makes one block. Put together a whole bunch of these blocks, with the shops and apartments facing each other across the newly defined streets, and you've got a chunk of city. As it happens, prefabricated parking deck trusses span about 60 feet. So let's say you make your parking deck a loaf 60 feet wide and 120 feet deep. If you face it on all sides with shops that are 50 feet deep, well, voilà -- you've got yourself a walkable city block, with just enough space left over for sidewalks, bike lanes and streets. Then you build apartments or offices over the shops.

What happens in the parking lots would have a ripple effect on the surrounding environment, too: Leinberger and Rippeteau suggest redesign of the fast-moving arterials and highways that typically service suburban retail to become latter-day versions of the classic 19th-century Parisian boulevards.

(Which reminds me of this photoessay from San Francisco Cityscape on the development of Octavia Boulevard, a "complete street" designed to supplant the Central Freeway, lost in the 1991 Loma Prieta earthquake. Think of the ugliest arterial road you can, look at that photoessay, and imagine how much sprawl could change.)

But what would happen inside the big box store itself? Roger K. Lewis, professor emeritus in the School of Architecture at the University of Maryland, suggests ways to convert a big box structure to housing by selectively opening some of its regular structural bays.

The exterior walls are not hard to punch windows into -- structurally, they're just steel uprights sometimes reinforced with diagonal struts. Then you punch skylights in over the interior walkways, and the apartments almost start laying themselves out. You add a balcony here, a second floor there, a sleeping loft over yonder, and you're looking at the niftiest affordable housing ever.

Conversely, the former site of so much globalized consumer activity could serve a new role as incubator of local food production.

Organic gardeners routinely lay down weed-suppressing black plastic into which they poke holes to plant their seeds. Asphalt is just like that, only a little thicker, observes Darrel Rippeteau, principal of Rippeteau Architects. So in the process of creating a truck garden (above), the parking lot becomes an orchard. Under the parking lot you find an elaborate network of drainage pipes -- if you think big-box owners want to see women in high heels slipping on ice, you are out of your mind. In its new incarnation, the system collects rainwater for irrigation. In fact, the water can be piped into the fire-suppression sprinkler system in the big box, which now serves as a monster mister. (You could also go hydroponic.) Much of the roof, of course, has become glass or translucent plastic. Those gigunda halogens make great grow lights. The concrete slab floor works as a heat sump. Major-league climate control comes with the package. Much of the produce is packed up in the back and shipped to farmers' markets. But you can also pick your own.

There's also possibility in the roof--either as a green roof, capable of small-scale agricultural production; or as a greenhouse roof, illuminating the vast floor space below. The proposal below from Esocoff & Associates uses the latter approach.

In her book, Big Box Reuse, artist and Oberlin College professor Julia Christensen explores the ramifications of big box conversions through a wide variety of recent examples, focusing on defunct KMart and WalMart properties nationwide. As she notes in the book's introduction:

By examining the reuse of these sites, we get a glimpse of what our future might look like as we continue to adapt these buildings into our everyday nonretail lives. We also cull a compelling portrait of this moment in the development of our built environment, which inevitably speaks of our culture, of our activities, of our lives. There is a cultural shift at hand, as groups such as schools and senior resource centers "supersize" and find big box buildings more and more useful for their own operation.

As the form of cities, bound up with environmental, social and economic concerns, appears to gain a more important role in a global discussion, Christensen's book is a must-read for anyone interested in the design of the Western city of the near future. Like it or not, big box retail is a constituent part of our cities, and Christensen correctly points out that its re-invention offers just as much possibility as that of a defunct industrial loft building. It's the loft building of the present day, in fact. We know what to do with the former factory; but what about the urban fringe?

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