Developers Rethink the Mall for the 21st Century
Jul 27, 2010 10:52 AM, By Elaine Misonzhnik
City Creek Center
Who said the regional mall is dead? The concept is very much alive and cooler than ever, to judge by the City Creek Center in Salt Lake City, Utah. All it needed was a few modern twists.
To start with, the 700,000-square-foot City Creek Center boasts an unorthodox co-developer—the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, which conceived the mall as part of its redevelopment of Salt Lake City’s downtown. The Church has its headquarters there and undertook the project to keep the properties surrounding its offices economically viable.
When the project got underway, in the early 2000s, the Church already owned the ZCMI mall on South State Street. The Church then purchased the Crossroads Plaza Mall across the street, with plans to combine the struggling centers into a unified retail emporium. When completed, the new retail center will be part of a 20-acre complex which will also include 1.6 million square feet of office space, 700 residential units and 500 hotel rooms.
The Church, which is handling the office and residential portions, brought in Bloomfield Hill, Mich.–based Taubman Centers Inc., to build its new mall. “They are a sophisticated real estate entity,” says Bruce Heckman, vice president of development with Taubman. “We looked at the opportunity and the caliber of the organization and we are very pleased to be partners.”
Taubman, which entered the project in early 2003, envisioned the new center as a traditional regional mall, but set in a walkable, largely open-air environment. The redeveloped mall will incorporate two main structures connected by a pedestrian sky-bridge. A 124,000-square-foot Nordstrom, formerly a tenant at Crossroads Plaza, will anchor the portion of the mall located on West Temple Street, while a 150,000-square-foot Macy’s store will anchor the one located on Main Street. A 1,200-foot waterway path will run through the mall’s walkways and plazas, mimicking the City Creek that once ran through that portion of town. Taubman also plans to install fountains and ponds in the mall’s public spaces.
In addition, the mall will incorporate a fully retractable roof, the first of its kind for a retail property in the U.S., according to Heckman.
The roof will be able to solve the problem of keeping the center active all year round, notes Greg Lyon design principal with Nadel Inc., a Los Angeles-based architecture firm. It will be made of transparent glass held up by curved columns, so it will serve as a skylight when the mall will be covered and will kneel down, disappearing from view, when recessed.
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