TOWN-MALL is a transformation of the Lincoln Square Mall in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, designed by Victor Gruen in 1963. The mall was relatively successful until a complex of Big Box stores was constructed outside the city, sending the downtown into decline. In response to the planning department’s interest in reviving the failed city-center mall, we proposed instead to re-purpose the now abandoned and under-utilized Big Box stores at the edge of the city. The project explores how to reclaim the familiar typology of the Big Box as a new public type in the suburban periphery. Through this conceptual bait-and-switch, we began to experiment with the monumentality of the Big Box. Their neutral, familiar, and powerful surfaces held our attention and offered a chance to redirect their iconicity into a new space of civic representation.

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The project consists of a thickened perimeter containing the services of the building, maintaining the generic central space. By adapting this commercial space as a stage for collective assembly, the Big Box shed becomes a new agora for social and political life. The opulent marble liner encircling the vast interior of the shed elevates the status of the building as civic. Through a simple reworking of the interior systems and material fit-outs, the project updates the generic condition of the Big Box into a new type of municipal monumentality. 

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Included in the Rejected Exhibition at the Banvard Gallery at the Knowlton School of Architecture, The Ohio State University. Curated by Team B, 2019.

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Lincoln Square Mall Transformation in Urbana, Illinois, 2018

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Project Leads: Daniel Jacobs, Brittany Utting