May 2008 Archives

Thesis title : The Church Mall, The church as a shopping experience, the mall as a holy experience, unholy mass draws holy mass.

The church mall is contrasting and similar. The passage is key. Spiritual and material pilgrims flow through its spaces ever-seeking be it god or the next best thing to buy.

Program: The church is strict and structured through the procession of spaces that service its rituals. The church is dead, un crowded, neglected and private.

 The shopping mall is free, porous and ever-developing drawing in newer methods to attract the mass of crowds. The shopping mall is alive, crowded, ever-changing and communal.

They are opposite, in their flow they unite, pilgrimage is what combines the two together. The holy becomes the unholy and the unholy becomes holy, boundaries are blurred co-existing side to side, feeding off each other. For this, the church is overtaken by the mall acting as a catalyst to bring in the crowds.

Materiality (structuring): In The church mall the structure is big, bold and made permanent by its columns called pin-drops which increases in ornamentation and structuring as it reaches towards the heart of the church, the altar. The church is found within its core, the cross, and it’s extensions the chapels linger in the volume of the mall. The mall is thin and temporary showcasing a gridded framework to house areas for shops. The pin-drops gradation of ornamentation acts as a barrier to define the perimeter of the holy grand church. As they lessen in ornamentation mass they become porous and allow an ease of access to the crowds hence becoming the familiar communal mall.

Experientially (spaces): Because of this contrasting an overlapping approach in programmatic, material and structural similarities create interesting clashes, redefining the meaning of holy and unholy. The programs overlap by reference to time and space allocation which is dictated by the elaboration and or simplicity of the structure.

Building the ‘iconic’ !

With all the masses of however arguably unique or ‘iconic’ buildings are in the world, the church is no stranger to the term*… conversely, what? and how? Could the ’iconic’ be reapplied to the modern church and free it from its pre-conceived rigidity and timeless historical significance promoting it into a newer future?

I currently pronounce that the new world Religion is capitalism! The dollar, the pound, the economy, all feed into one major common compound and that is commercialism. It surrounds us in every aspect of our known existence, from the way it jumps at you, attracts you, mesmerizes you, and almost seduces you.

The commercial aspect of the church does exist in some way; the endless row of memorabilia shops that surround the Vatican city is living proof.

Breaking down the food chain of the church capability to commercialize is from [REFER]

GOD – SCRIPTURE – ICON – WORSHIP – COMMERCE

reducing the deity to a simple hand held memento or souvenir.

The church has always been inventive in redirecting the focus of its followers towards god, through art, symbols, and a fantasmagoria of different effects. ‘The Shopping Mall’ could be the modern version of those redirections.  Nonetheless, shopping malls do exist under church patron ship in the United States, yet in Rome they still reside within the classical fossils of its beautiful history.  This does not mean that the modern churches that have surfaced like the Mega-church are still following the strict attitudes of the church body; they start to be familiar to that of the average super-shopping mall through scale, shape and interior execution. One major aspect that ties the church experience to the shopping experience is the pilgrimage factor, amalgamating to the creation of the Church mall.

Pilgrimage is ritualistic to both the church and the shopping mall.

The ritual of the church is defined by its liturgy and scripture.

The ritual of the mall is defined by the brand value and its signage

The church is grand, holy, formal, robust, excessive, textured and expensive.

The mall is humble, unholy, informal, flimsy, moderate, bare and cheap.

These characteristics all translate into the formal grandeur and or bareness of the church mall. The new church mall should adhere to all these contrasting ritualistic juxtapositions, at times they would meet and at other times would part, going back to their original conventional use in either the mall or the church.

Naturally, the site chosen is EUR Rome, due to its grand and ambitious architectural Fachist startings in the modernist 30s. It’s only right to apply the Church mall as a new addition to the site. The area is going under a rejuvenation plan to modernize it to the 21st century. The blunt positioning of the Church mall on an empty plot of land will parade off the new landmark.

The cruciform shape, has always had an undeniable almost divine relationship to the church body and apparently so to that of the shopping mall floor plan. The shape provides a linear formality to the inner circulation and organization of the interior spaces. It also allows for the conveyance of the ‘pilgrimage’ experience to the church via the procession towards the altar and to the shopping mall via the pilgrimage from boutique to boutique.

Why the cruciform shape? Well, an important part of the church’s body, the ‘nave’ was another method of attracting people to the church. It used to exist as the lively dynamic body of the church, with markets and shops that flourished its floors leading you to the inner holier part of the altar. The regular procession of spaces started from the west façade towards the east (apse) but no further, the adoption of the crucifix shape as in the shopping mall plans before shows a sense of linearity for the shops to form around it and situate accessibility and circulation within the structure.

Part of the shopping experience is definitely through the corridor (nave) aisle ?

‘’Corridors are the main arteries of the shopping organ and the driving force of shopping dynamics’’ Rem Koolhaas, Rem Koolhaas, Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping.