THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, August 16, 1996 TAG: 9608160544
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B3 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY ALEX MARSHALL, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: NORFOLK LENGTH: 77 lines
The city tried unsuccessfully years ago to interest developers in a design for the planned MacArthur Center mall that was strikingly similar to one proposed earlier this month by an alternative group of designers, a city design consultant revealed Thursday evening.
Trying to force such a plan on developers now would kill the project because the developers and department stores say such a design is not commercially viable, said city design consultant Ray Gindroz.
The earlier designs by the city had stores facing the streets, with parking garages hidden behind storefronts. One design featured a broad open-aired avenue between Scope and the MacArthur Memorial, which was a feature of a design by land planner Gerald Porterfield that formed the basis of work by the alternative group.
Slides showing these ideas were part of the 1 1/2-hour presentation by Gindroz, who is based in Pittsburgh, to a group of local architects. Gindroz is leading the design process for the planned $300 million mall. The city is supplying one-third of the money to build the mall. Mall developer The Taubman Co. is putting up the rest.
Gindroz explained and defended the city's approved design, which has drawn criticism as being too inwardly focused, more like a suburban shopping mall than an urban street.
Such an inwardly focused mall, say the critics, will not bring neighboring streets back to life commercially and will not mesh aesthetically with the rest of the city.
Gindroz said Thursday night that the essentials of the mall's design were determined by the mall developer, The Taubman Co., and the two major department stores now signed as anchors, Nordstrom and Dillards.
Changing these essentials - stores along Monticello Avenue and parking garages aimed at capturing cars off the freeway - would mean ``changing the program,'' essentially killing the project.
The audience of architects and design professionals, some of them prominent critics of the mall, were gathered for the monthly meeting of the Hampton Roads Chapter of the American Institute of Architects.
After the speech, AIA president Patrick Masterson said the mall did not connect well to neigboring city streets - a principal that Gindroz had expounded as part of good city design.
In reply, Gindroz told Masterson it was not his job to set city policy or defend it, but to do the best job with what the fundamentals of the project demanded. The alternative, Gindroz said, was to allow the $300 million, 1.2-million-square-foot shopping mall to go to another city or to the suburbs.
The arguments to date have mostly concerned the layout of the mall, or site plan. The facade is being designed, and Gindroz showed alternative versions.
One entranceway featured a classical-style facade that matched the nearby MacArthur Memorial, while another showed a more festival-type entranceway with glass tiles or windows.
A more final design will be presented at a public meeting Sept. 18 at Nauticus, Gindroz said, before the Downtown Norfolk Council and other bodies. Gindroz stressed that criticism of the facade, including too many blank walls, was being considered during the design process.
In defending the project, Gindroz stressed that the mall did not work in isolation. Even if internally focused, the mall could still be connected to neighboring Granby and other streets through pedestrian walkways, a trolley and a planned sight-seeing tour of historical areas.
The mall, he said, was part of an overall strategy to revive downtown. The design of the mall was a complicated, difficult process, Gindroz said, in part because it involved the cooperation of numerous interests, including the developer, two department stores and the city.
Gindroz spoke under the condition that discussion afterward be limited to the plan shown by the city, and not other designs proposed by the alternative group.
The principal plan drawn by the alternative group would have stores face all four streets surrounding the mall, and would have interior mall walkways resemble interior streets more than conventional mall hallways. ILLUSTRATION: V.W. VAUGHAN
City design consultant Ray Gindroz told a group of local architects
that drastically redesigning the mall could kill it.
KEYWORDS: MACARTHUR CENTER MALL DESIGN by CNB