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I read with some bemusement, the SN&R cover story about the woes of our downtown plaza. Interestingly, despite being an engaging read, all I could remember was the brilliantly explosive cover and the line:

“Let’s just put this out there: Maybe we should blow up the mall.”

On Friday, I heard another version of the same basic “the mall is dead” story on NPR and, likewise, today, can’t seem to recall anything from the story. This, despite my dislike of malls and my agreement that they are fundamentally broken.

But, immediately following that story, NPR cleverly added one that did catch my ear and my curiosity enough to actually go online and look up more.

In a nutshell: a group of artists covertly took over an unused room in the parking garage of a mall in downtown Providence, Rhode Island and, over the course of 4 years, converted it into a home that, up until last week, went undetected by mall security.

Trummerkind
I think it might be a little pretentious for them to call this an art installation but I love their name for the unit/project:

The post-WWII term Trummerkind - German for “children of the ruins” - connotes the children of war-torn areas who had lost their families and/or homes, and were left to grow up in a society that required rebuilding and healing. They made their homes in the ally-bombed ruins of cities and towns and lived off the landscapes.

I may be going too far down the over-intellectualizing path, but, viewing this (albeit illegal) activity through the lens of Trummerkind suddenly elevates the story into a kind of Postmodern trope that addresses the ironies, oxymorons and complexities of our current models of living where much has been sacrificed for our unswerving devotion to Consumerism. If the aspirations of the living space—luxury apartment– seem somewhat shallow; they simply mirror the values of the mall. There’s more to be plumbed here…

Regardless, I can’t help but observe that this ad-hoc group was essentially bringing mixed use into a single-use development—in this case adding residential to commercial. Its also somewhat of a application of adaptive re-use and re-thinking waste: apparently, the empty room was originally constructed merely to house construction materials. Then there’s the “small spaces work in an urban settings” argument.

But, perhaps overshadowing all of this is the general idea about the power of human creativity in re-thinking even something as banal as a mall. And maybe this is why this story stuck with me and the others didn’t: it wasn’t a diatribe on the problem (”malls are dead”) it was a story about human invention and the triumph of human creativity over trends, over paralyzing obstacles, over destruction and waste and mind-numbing boredom, over the status quo.

You can see a video of the unit here.

Jason