2008_Urban Battery permalink

The strip mall is already perfect and abject. Redecorating a strip mall makes no sense; all they need is some maintenance perhaps a fresh coat of paint. Reconfiguring a strip mall with an attempt to bring some life back into it, to make a glorious architectural spectacle, or somehow produce a small urban fragment, a reproduction of a lively part of New York's West village that's been radically cropped and condensed is flawed.

They are about an economic efficiency, doing the least, stripped-down. The most pragmatic solution from a developer's point of view would be to renovate the existing facades, making a Wild West storefront, but as an 「ideas」 competition, we decided to explore radical alternatives and potential futures where the strip mall calibrates the local environment as a giant filter, exposes its backside to the surrounding neighborhoods essentially opening what has been typically enclosed, and creating a program that reflects environmental and societal concerns.

Strip malls are a symptom of a greater problem, where private development has trumped the public good, providing the minimum amenities without defining a collective identity of urban space. The public square of the strip mall is a hot asphalt parking lot, which is both the center of attention for the surrounding strip buildings and its leftover, unconsidered space. If anything what is universally common and economically necessary amongst all strip malls is the parking lot.

The strip mall type is made up of discontinuous volumes. Here, we decided to unify the disparate strips through the site's most contested component the parking lot. This is our site of interest and where we thought the design could perform, integrated into urban infrastructures. Our proposal URBAN BATTERY is an attempt to reframe and recycle the leftover parking and motivate it towards a utopian desire at a very local scale, a micro-utopia. To counteract the effects of obesity, pollution, and urban sprawl we propose a prototype with a minimal footprint and maximum surface to offset the negative effects of the strip(s).

The Scottsdale competition site lacks any healthy urban infrastructures, no community centers, no pools, no green space, it's a dead quadrant. URBAN BATTERY reinvigorates it.

In terms of zoning, Urban Battery is a physical structure similar to a power station, vertical greenhouse, and a billboard, all rolled into one. It doesn't fit into the zoning chart. We believe that Scottsdale zoning is open enough to accommodate the programmatic innovation, even though this proposal is beyond the original intention of the competition. Urban Battery acts as an energy producer, filtering air, housing oxygen regenerating plants, providing bike paths, public gardens within the structure, and stores bioproducts. It also includes an additional building for community events that is attached at the base of the structure. This additional program could be for either teens or seniors dedicated to expanding activities from the neighborhood and accessible through a new bike and walking path, converting the alley into part of an urban infrastructure. "

-From the FlipaStrip Competition Boards, we were invited to the competition and awarded the first prize.

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