Deze conferentie onderzoekt de bijdrage van het shopping center tot de gebouwde omgeving na de Wereldoorlogen en tot de architectuurcultuur. Keynotes door David Smiley (Columbia) en Helena Mattsson (KTH School of Architecture).
U leest verder in het Engels
This conference will offer a fine-grained, region-specific reading of the shopping centre. Reassessing this commercial typology’s key characteristics, it will investigate the shopping centre’s contribution to post-war built environments and architectural culture.
The conference is subdivided into four sessions, each focused on a particular theme.
The first session, ‘Acculturating the Shopping Centre’ will investigate if ‘hybrids’ developed as the paradigmatic shopping centre concept, the American dumbbell mall, encountered different socio-cultural climates, and what region-specific typologies can be identified. It also questions if, as societies changed over time, the shopping centre concept also—in a true Darwinistic fashion—evolved over time. The second session, ‘Building Collectives and Communities’ focuses on the reformist underpinnings and socio-cultural ambitions of shopping centres. It questions the role of shopping centres as new figures of collectivity in the post-war urban realm. ‘From Node to Stitch’, the third conference session, conversely addresses the role that the shopping centre has played in urban planning from 1943 to today. It connects the shopping centre’s development to urban reconstruction and revitalisation efforts on the one hand and explores the role that this commercial typology assumed in (post-war) urban expansion and structured suburbanisation on the other. The final session, ‘The Afterlife of Post-war Shopping Centres’ seeks to set out strategies for the contemporary redevelopment of post-war shopping centres. By identifying ‘best practices’, speakers in this session will explore if for the increasing number of American (and European) ‘dead malls’ there can be new life after death?
Keynote lectures will be given by David Smiley (Columbia University, U.S.) and Helena Mattsson (KTH School of Architecture, Sweden)
For more information visit: www.shoppingcentreconference.com
Conference convenors are Janina Gosseye and Tom Avermaete.