Mall Fall: A Sharing Ecosystem for Collective Living 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.
100-Day Exhibition: Labor, Robots, and Corridors This thesis proposes a weird, giant, and cycling memorial spectacle with the introduction of a new sort of labor in the format of a 100-day exhibition. The robotic machines replaced the enslaved persons to run a closed system of deconstruction and reconstruction: a constant displacement of architectural productions. The whole island is a museum. The exhibition is a constantly work-in-progress construction.
LABORS
Hashima Island was a self-sufficient company town run by Mitsubishi. While being approved as a World Heritage Site as part of Japan’s Meiji Industrial Revolution, it is also a site of forced labor before and during World War II. In 1974, the mines were closed, the island became a ghost town.
ROBOTS
Compared to human labor, robotic labor is highly efficient, emotionless, and precise. It is good at copy & paste and making mistakes perfectly without knowing it. To make a contrast between human labor’s logic and the programmed robots’ logic, asking the robots to repeat the perfect flaws to build the structural modules is the core constructive method for this exhibition.
CORRIDORS
The corridor is not only circulation and servant space. It should be considered as an organizational device for facilitating public interaction while maintaining a divider for separating the private and public at the same time. The corridor wants to be a room as well. In this thesis, the “new” serves as the XL corridor filled in the interstitial spaces between the existing residential buildings. The cluster of buildings becomes a single building with a matrix of connected modules and non-typical corridors.