Mall Fall: A Sharing Ecosystem for Collective Living

Item

Title
Mall Fall: A Sharing Ecosystem for Collective Living
Description
The suburban shopping mall, once a prototypical feature of the American suburban landscape, has been in decline for several decades. Like a whale carcass which is dissected and shared by numerous organisms, the dead mall offers a concentrated opportunity for a new ecosystem through the occupation and transformation of the large structure. Using the Greece Ridge Mall in Rochester, New York, this thesis imagines this ecosystem by redefining suburban everyday practices of sharing into forms of collective living: from potlucks and hosting students to community classes and home businesses. Applying adaptive reuse strategies to retrofit the anchor stores, concourses, and mall architecture, the project questions both the spatial form of increasingly important sharing behaviors and the picture of housing in suburbia. Behaviors, from sharing a fridge to sharing a spare room, gradually create a complex ecosystem to enrich the new residents and surrounding community until the mall is completely shared.
Creator
Hu, Emily R
Subject
adaptive re-use
co-housing
collective living
mall
sharing
suburbs
Architecture
Contributor
Haber-Thomson, Lisa
Reidel, Jacob
Date
2024-09-26T12:03:58Z
2024
2024-05-21
2024
2024-09-26T12:03:58Z
Type
Thesis or Dissertation
text
Format
application/pdf
application/pdf
Identifier
Hu, Emily R. 2024. Mall Fall: A Sharing Ecosystem for Collective Living. Master's thesis, Harvard Graduate School of Design.
31298847
https://nrs.harvard.edu/URN-3:HUL.INSTREPOS:37379524
Language
en