THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, June 27, 1996 TAG: 9606270371
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY ALEX MARSHALL, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: NORFOLK LENGTH: 143 lines
City design leaders and citizens questioned Wednesday whether the proposed MacArthur Center mall would be too enclosed and suburban to enliven an old downtown that depends on filling streets with people.
While tempered in general by praise for the overall concept, the criticism ranged from mild concerns over too many blank walls to a suggestion to scrap the design altogether.
The comments, at a design meeting at City Hall, were some of the first public criticisms of the design. But they reflected similar concerns discussed over the last few years at other forums.
The discussions brought out a basic tension between the mall owners, who said an inwardly focused mall would be best for business, and city design leaders and concerned citizens who want the mall to face outward to some degree to enliven neighboring streets with people and traffic.
``I have to say that philosophically it is against a retailer's (interests) to offer a good view of the street,'' Clyde M. Webb, an architect for Dillard's department store, said after Planning Commissioner Donald Williams suggested the mall offer more vistas onto downtown. ``If people are shopping, you want them to keep shopping. If they want to go outside, they can go outside.''
The proposed mall is essentially already under construction, with workers tearing down half of the Freemason Street parking garage to make way for a new street.
Planning commissioners and Design Review Board members did not question the basic footprint of the building, which was approved two years ago by the board in a package of preliminary design guidelines.
But substantial room for debate remained on how the mall should face Monticello, City Hall, Cumberland and Freemason, the four streets that surround it. The current design may violate city zoning ordinances that require at least 50 percent of a building's frontage in this part of downtown to be ``transparent,'' meaning windows, doorways or show windows.
The design presented Wednesday included drawings and computer-simulated photos of the Dillard's and Nordstrom department stores. They showed brick walls without street-level windows or displays. Planning Commission and Design Review Board members said this would bore passers-by and discourage walking.
``I can show you spaces in this city where we have made the mistake of putting solid masonry walls up to the street, and I will show you places that are dead,'' said Planning Commission Chairman William Craig.
William Hiotaky, senior vice president with Taubman Co., the mall's developer, said modern department stores need interior wall space for dressing rooms, storage and other needs. They cannot afford to waste walls on displays, or windows out to exterior streets, he said in one extended discussion.
``Showroom windows are an absolute anathema to many retailers,'' Hiotaky said. ``It's a concept they are steering away from.''
The questions by the Planning Commission and the Design Review Board ended with the mall developer and department store representatives promising to think up ways to enliven streets, although they repeated concerns that showroom windows would not work.
When comments were allowed by private citizens, Mark D. Perreault, a member of the Norfolk Historical Society, advocated an alternative design to reorient the mall so that its stores would face City Hall and Monticello avenues.
``This is a bastille, a fortress, isolated from the rest of the city,'' said Perreault, in remarks introducing his alternative design. ``We cannot, in our eagerness to get retailers here, lose our perspective. How will this mall look in 2005?''
As the mall is designed now, parking garages take up most of the street frontage on City Hall Avenue. Perreault's design would put shop windows and possibly shop entrances along both City Hall and Monticello.
The drawback of Perreault's design, say city leaders who have reviewed it, is that it would create one gigantic box of parking, rather than two smaller garages. This may intimidate some shoppers, and it would increase the distance many shoppers would have to walk to enter the mall. It would also violate a condition demanded by Nordstrom that it have parking on two sides.
Perreault, who has sent his plans to city leaders over the last few weeks, questioned whether a mall would remain popular over many years. He noted that some retail professionals say more urban-style shopping environments are gaining in popularity.
Patrick C. Masterson, a local architect who is president of the Hampton Roads chapter of the American Institute of Architects, said most changes in the mall's design would be only cosmetic unless its basic structure was altered.
``When you look at that first slide and see that huge black blob amid all those smaller scale buildings, you see that something is inappropriate,'' Masterson said in an interview after Wednesday's meeting.
Similar criticism of the Mac-Arthur mall has rumbled within the design community for several years, locally and nationally. The heart of the debate goes to a philosophy among many architects and planners that good design in a downtown should create street-level public spaces, rather than private, interior worlds.
At a seminar in Charlottesville in October 1993, then-Mayor Mason C. Andrews presented the design of the mall to a group of architects, planners and mayors. He encountered a hailstorm of criticism, he remembered in an interview this week.
``Why would you want to build a mall in downtown Norfolk?'' Andrews said he remembers former Charlotte Mayor Harvey Gantt asking him.
Gantt, who is also an architect, is running for the U.S. Senate in North Carolina.
``People really jumped all over him (Andrews),'' said Christine Saum, executive director of the Mayors' Institute on City Design, which sponsored the Charlottesville seminar. The nonprofit organization, based in Washington, is intended to teach city leaders good design principles.
``They didn't like the fact that it was closing off streets. They wanted to maintain the street grid, and that it not be completely internally focused.''
A more street-level design, Saum said, would also allow the city to put apartments and offices above stores, which would encourage the type of urban living and working the city wants.
Ray Gindroz, a Pittsburgh-based architect who works closely with the city of Norfolk, said Wednesday he initially advocated a street-level shopping district, similar to the one described by Saum. Built like a modified old-fashioned downtown, it would have resembled projects like the Reston Town Center in Northern Virginia. But he found that such a concept could not fly here economically and was ultimately not suited for large department stores.
Saum said the best projects are those where a city's political leaders work with developers and designers, and do not allow either to dictate what a building should look like.
``That's where strong political leadership comes in,'' Saum said. ``Too often, city leaders are intimidated by both the demands of the development community, and the demands of the design community.''
``The best designs are a result of collaboration.'' ILLUSTRATION: Color photos
Graphics
RICHARD L. DUNSTON/The Virginian-Pilot
CURRENT PLAN
Above: A computer-generated scene of Dillard's department store,
which will be one of the anchors of the MacArthur Center mall in
downtown Norfolk. Below is the current design of the mall, as
proposed by Taubman Co., the mall's developer. It includes two
separate parking areas.
ALTERNATIVES
Above: A retail facility in Charleston, S.C., suggests an
alternative to the design proposed for the MacArthur Center. Below
is the alternative design offered by Mark D. Perreault, a member of
the Norfolk Historical Society. It reorients the mall so that its
stores would face City Hall and Monticello avenues.
Color photo
RICHARD L. DUNSTON/The Virginian-Pilot
Mark D. Perreault's design would put windows along streets-side
store-fronts.
KEYWORDS: MACARTHUR SQUARE ARCHITECTURE by CNB