The Sensorium of the City Lays Siege to the Shopping Mall:
A Story Told in Handmade Film Animation

by Aristofanis Soulikias 

Private vs public, control vs spontaneity, corporate vs community, car vs human body, mix-use,  dead mall disintegrates into ruin and beauty, connectivity, transparency, grit. 

The mall competes with the city street and its unpredictable sensoriality. Today the fascination  for artificiality and newness is giving way to the appreciation for authenticity and directness.  And since the mall, along with television and the freeway, articulated, in physical terms, the  dislocation from the city, one might say it was the precursor of our virtual present. As explained  by Margaret Morse, it was “a locus of virtualization […] that is, a partial loss of touch with the  here-and-now.” (1998, p.99). This yearning for physical presence, for orientation, adventure,  casual encounters, and mindless wandering is one that the current pandemic has brought to the  fore. The city with its unpolished surfaces, which have many stories to tell, and her sounds and  smells has survived and prevailed.

Bibliography 

Beato, Greg. (2011). Malls of a Certain Age: The shopping mall: a look back. Reason.,  42(11), 18-19.  

Gyulai, Linda. (2018). Royalmount mega mall project now includes up to 6,000 housing  units. The Montreal Gazette. Retrieved from The Montreal Gazette website:  https://montrealgazette.com/news/local-news/royalmount-mega-mall-project now-includes-up-to-6000-housing-units 

Howes, D. (2005). Architecture of the senses. In M. Zardini (Ed.), Sense of the city: an  alternate approach to urbanism (pp. 322-330). Montreal: Canadian Centre for  Architecture and Lars Müller Publishers. 

Jacobs, Jane. (1961). Death and life of Great American Cities. London: The Bodley  Head. 

Minton, Anna. (2012). Ground Control: Fear and happiness in the twenty-first-century 

city: Penguin UK. 

Morse, Margaret. (1998). Virtualities: television, media art, and cyberculture. In Theories  of contemporary culture ; v. 21. Retrieved from  

http://hdl.handle.net/2027/heb.08251 

Pallasmaa, Juhani. (2016). Inhabiting time. Architectural Design, 86(1), 50-59.  

Images sourced from: 

Abandoned Rolling Acres Dead Mall - A Retail Graveyard 

https://www.placesthatwere.com/2017/07/rolling-acres-dead-mall.html 

Mont-Royal (Québec) 

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Centre_Rockland_12.jpg 

Trajan’s Market  

https://www.italyreview.com/uploads/2/6/3/6/26365745/trajan-s-market-rome-9_orig.jpg

© 2022

Figure 1 Conceptual sketch of mall as ruin 

Now, at a time when even virtual sensations are provided by more sophisticated and portable  means, the mall’s artificiality feels inadequate. It is neither public enough as the city square nor  escapist enough as the screens that surround us. With the fall from grace of the automobile, the  technology that made it possible, the mall’s future seems precarious. In North America, the  phenomenon of the “dead mall” is pervasive. Will malls be reinvented? Will they be erased  from map and memory? Or will there be remnants of these audacious complexes that will re harmonize with the city?

In this probe, I see the mall as ruin. Not necessarily as urban eyesore but as a structure that  gradually surrenders to the forces of the city. Pores, erosions, and openings reconnect at last the  recluse spaces of the mall to the adjacent streets. Neighbourhoods, once split by malls, now  reconnect. Malls become passageways, curiosities and perhaps real piazzas this time around. It is the case with what many archaeologists consider the mall’s distant ancestor, Trajan’s Market  in Rome.

I am in the process of creating animated clips that feature that threshold between the ruin and the  city beyond its cracks. I am modelling this imaginary mall on the architecture of Centre  Rockland. It is one of the least suburban malls in Montreal, as it straddles between two  relatively old neighbourhoods, Town of Mount Royal and Park Extension. Could Rockland  become from buffer zone to node that will connect these two socio-economically very different  places?

An initial animation