THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, July 11, 1996 TAG: 9607110002
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A14 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Opinion
SOURCE: By PATRICK C. MASTERSON
LENGTH: 63 lines
Staff writer Alex Marshall referred in his June 27 article to a meeting in October 1993 when planners and mayors from around the country voiced serious reservations about the very concept of MacArthur Center - Norfolk's attempt at shoehorning a suburban shopping mall into an urban downtown.
Clearly the concept had not progressed further when in April of 1995, NRHA presented the plans to a group of 40 architects representing firms from across Hampton Roads. As the room fell silent after that presentation, one prominent local architect, visibly shaken, rose to his feet in disbelief. He could barely articulate how sharply the project insulted what Norfolk has been trying to accomplish for decades with its urban planning. If nothing could be done to dissuade the city from proceeding, the group insisted, then at the very least MacArthur Center must provide genuine and vital amenities at street level. Even that was too much to hope for.
NRHA opened the Design Review meeting June 26 with the presentation of a slide depicting the colossal MacArthur Center dwarfing its neighbors, inflated to the extremities of its huge site. That single slide highlighted the mall's central flaw - that a building totally out of scale with its neighbors, so insensitive to its adjacent historic context, so introverted, so pedestrian-unfriendly - that no such building could possibly belong in the heart of a city remotely committed to revitalizing its downtown. Ominously, the project seems to consume new adjacent properties each time it's shown.
At the design review, nary a word was spoken of the mall's core design concept, resigned as everyone seems to its inevitability. Instead, architects for the various pieces of the project unveiled drawing after drawing, many utilizing the latest computer technology to depict one very big, very bland building - a design devoid of almost any color and certainly devoid of local color. Vignetttes of nouveau-traditional design thinly masquerade as architecture. Though some mall entrances align with adjacent streets, nothing else about the design, save the way it so indelicately side-steps several now Lilliputian historic homes, says that this building belongs in Norfolk - or anywhere in particular for that matter.
The very corner of Monticello and City Hall avenues that once gave life to Norfolk's teeming city market will now give rise to a tall, blank, beige block of a wall.
And there lies the greatest problem: the way the mall presents itself at street level - or, rather, fails to. The building will have roughly the same number of pedestrian street entrances as Waterside, a building a fraction the size. And for the majority of its vast periphery there will be no street-side store entrances, no windows, no place to so much as stand protected from rain.
Whatever gratifying experience the mall may hold inside, it creates a meager and heartless street-side environment. Rather than helping to connect its surrounding neighbors, the center's sheer enormity thwarts any comfortable appreciation of what remains of downtown's architectural heritage. And while successful urban revitalization across this country puts pedestrians first, MacArthur Center puts pedestrians last.
If MacArthur Center's only purpose were to balance its own financial obligations, its planning and design indignities might be overlooked. But even shopping malls have civic responsibilities.
MacArthur Center is a mammoth warehouse, lacking the grace of a garden shed, squeezed into the heart of city struggling to recreate itself. Norfolk deserves better. MEMO: Patrick Masterson is president of the Hampton Roads Chapter of the
American Institute of Architects. by CNB