John Jourden: The project "Infrastructural Wal-mart" began as a team project. Can you describe how something like this begins – the collaborative process of design?

Alexander Maymind: The collaborative process began for two reasons. The mandate of our studio was to work in partners due to the scale and size of the project at hand, a large zone of the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn. Secondly and more importantly, we teamed up out of a mutual interest in speculating on what we as architects could offer to urban design. The studio asked its teams to define their area of intervention, project scale, and motivations relative to urban design discourse. In this sense, it was a lot like a thesis studio because the entire direction of each project was largely self-determined.

Cody Davis: I think first we had to contend with what an urban design project should be, especially in the context of Brooklyn which most of us know fairly well. We spent the first couple of weeks thinking of everything we did not want to do. We then decided to limit the project to a discrete area, one that occurred at the intersection of vast big-box shopping, empty horizontal parking lots, and a 95'-high elevated subway platform, rather than a large scale strategy that attempted to rewrite or recode zoning and massing for an entire urban territory.



We were concerned with a set of architectural responses to urban design that challenged the top-down masterplan exercise. Koolhaas, Ungers, Aureli and Portman were all part of the discussion.CD: We were concerned with a set of architectural responses to urban design that challenged the top-down masterplan exercise. Koolhaas, Ungers, Aureli and Portman were all part of the discussion. In particular, we were interested in architects that have contended with the world of retail and all of the banal tribulations that might lie there. We were interested in developing responses to the research from the Harvard Guide to Shopping and the work of John Portman, Jon Jerde, Victor Gruen, and early Frank Gehry.

AM: Acknowledging Koolhaas as the consummate contemporary architect who is able to look past what constitutes the discipline's own boundaries, we became interested in his response to urbanism, a dissolution of the discourse and its transformation into a discussion of events rather than definitions and limits. Five or six of OMA's projects in "S,M,L,XL" focused on discovering unnameable hybrids rather than fixed typologies, and on the manipulation of infrastructure rather than discrete building blocks. More importantly, all of these projects approach urbanism through a loose diagrammatic set of associations between the formal, social and political.


JJ: What precedents were most critical to forging a project of your own? And to what degree were these precedents motivated or used?

AM: There were a large number, many of the typical characters from the last twenty-five years. We tried to hold in our minds a series of divergent thoughts simultaneously- how we could process current attitudes towards preservation, the re-emergence of archipelagos, superblocks, infrastructural requirements... all while attempting to keep intact the grittiness of the site. We thought through a number of options that dealt with the qualities of the Gowanus Canal as a unique site. In that sense, the superblock and archipelago were particularly appealing as models because they did not rely on their extrinsic relationships to the city at large for their definition. Instead we wanted to sublimate what we had found there into a strategy.

CD: We felt that a conceptual archipelago lent itself to a set of operations on the city (the Gowanus Canal) rather more like acupuncture, through strategic selection of sites for intervention. Our decisions were informed by proximity to existing infrastructure, proposed redevelopment, real estate trends, and character of particular areas. To go back to the nebulous idea of events, our first inclination was to make something that dealt both with the staging of uncertainty rather than prescription and the design of the new. It was important to us that we acknowledge and respond to the conflicting scales of architecture and urbanism. We wanted to develop an incredibly potent mixture at the scale of a building or an urban block that would have the potential to broadcast beyond its limits. Thus the project hooked into the elevated subway line, re-located parking to platforms in the air, and exaggerated the existing warehouse already present on a corner of our chosen site. It was also important for us to formulate a response to our studio critic's work (Keller Easterling), specifically her discussion of spatial products which substitutes spin, logistics, and management styles for considerations of location, geometry, or enclosure.




JJ: Recently in the New York Times, there was an article on the Gowanus Canal that included this image, and this image for some reason or another delivers a sort of snap shot of the place. Not being at all familiar with the area, it also speaks to the imagery you created for your projects. I wonder what this image says to you both when you look at it.


CD: The photo from the New York Times effectively captures the current state of the Gowanus. It is a place, burdened with environmental issues, commercial speculation, and cultural resistance to large scale development. You can't help but notice the commercial signage looming in the background, so I think as a team, we wanted to find a response that critically examines the current trend.

AM: It speaks to the bizarre mix of big box retailing, the dissapearance of American industry, and empty stretches of waterfront that are too polluted or inaccessible to be considered hospitable for any typical urban revitalization. A series of conditions waiting to be taken advantage of in some way other than what might be obvious.

JJ: I see, and yet this type of building recasts a geographic area into a single event. How do you engage the user or participant of this building in a landscape that seems to overwhelm?

CD: In response to the problem our studio organizers postulated, we attempted to devise an urban scheme by inserting a decidedly non-urban, normative building type into a dense, vertical city space. The project positioned commercial programs of multiple scales relative to each other in order to fashion complex lateral environments that rethought public spaces of consumption. Also, we sought to engage the user by considering the strong element of shopping as the conceptual glue for the project. Although the complex is a parking garage, a Wal-mart, an assortment of other mall vendors, and housing, we thought that the divergent qualities of all of these elements would create an unpredictable mix. For our project specifically, a multi-level complex that welded extant transportation infrastructure with basic floor-plates to host various retail programs, from small boutiques, to open markets, to a big box vendor (here, a Wal-Mart). This had a lot to do with our desire to maximize and even fetishize difference for the sake of deviation, multiplicity, and identity; shopping and its associated sublime desires mutate as they take the shape of polychromatic patterns, agglomerate abrupt juxtapositions, and organize chaotic heterogeneity. To do this, we spent a lot of time speculating on the relationships between different commercial entities and their proximity to surrounding infrastructure, parking, their exposure to sunlight, etc. And how Wal-Mart, the only vertically continuous space in the complex could reinforce and challenge those relationships.


So we choose to reorient the big-box as a conceptual parasite- one that snakes around its neighbors to interrupt, interject, and interfere but in doing so breeds new audiences.AM: We also wanted to locate an architectural ambition for Wal-Mart that extends beyond efficiency. So we choose to reorient the big-box as a conceptual parasite- one that snakes around its neighbors to interrupt, interject, and interfere but in doing so breeds new audiences. The vertical heterogeneity is brought into cohesion through the infrastructural framework of a continuous parking circulation route which acts to parataxically string together various parts as an involuted datum of constant movement. Additionally, elevator shafts act as "skewers," binding the juxtaposed programs into a legible order. Thus the unified yet jarring set of different programmatic immersions are tied together as separate constellations, the horizontal expanse of each offers a set of competing mirages in the distance. At the level of the floor plate, an archipelago of multiple commercial shopping experiences exist in the ether of infrastructure.


JJ: I’m interested in the role type and program played in creating this project. It seems that the site provoked a response on the big box typology that was then corrupted and re-energized to create a sort of new urbanism--not suburban or urban but more of a utopian scheme.

Wal-mart was of interest to us because of it was the exact antithesis of what urban design projects typically deal with.AM: Wal-mart was of interest to us because of it was the exact antithesis of what urban design projects typically deal with. We wanted to confront the nitty gritty of how to design for a large multinational corporation, to effectively re-arrange and re-formulate their building type to manifest something new. This started by researching the emerging syncopation of design discourse with commercial gain. I would not call it quite utopian; we were more interested in real problems that somehow seem to be at the fringes of discussion. Similar to Bob Somol's call for an authorization of dubious practices or an expression of the collective, this project sought to identify concerns that shopping once had but may have lost.

CD: And the choice to take on the big box type was a response to the commercial trends already occurring in the area... Within this complex, to circulate store to store, visitors would have to pass through the main vertically stacked anchor. The Wal-Mart’s interior formation relied on current market-driven big box configurations, but unlike its suburban equivalents, its enclosure was transparent. “Skinned” by glass walls, and free of additional visual obstacles, Wal- Mart and its wares were visible to customers visiting the entourage of neighboring merchants from anywhere within the structure.

AM: More important than the visual transparency was the idea that this kind of abrupt juxtaposition actually creates positive friction. Something that is lacking in many other new urban propositions where segregation and division are the primary operations at hand. In a certain perverse sense, typology offered us raw material to manipulate although our concern for rules regarding corridors, atriums, and other such features were always to leverage them in unexpected ways. For example, the cantilevering parking platforms instead of being empty expanse, once lifted into the air offer fantastic views of the city and potential event spaces. All of this came from close observation of what the site offered once one liberated these potentials.




JJ: The project seems to embrace a low resolution mode of representation. How did representation capture or render the issues you were interested in?

CD: We had a fascination with visual "mashups" at the time; we were pulling from a lot of different contemporary graphic design and advertising, images pulled from the Internet, etc. Things that could be blended and composed to produce some kind of sublime desire that we felt was appropriate for this part of Brooklyn. The quality though was more for the sake of expediency. We were also relying on an abundance of imagery, large scale drawings – things that would reinforce the idea of a large scale carnival- like atmosphere. So everything was a result of literally slamming together, and overlaying imagery that was out there and accessible, but hopefully done in a way that would yield unique effects.







JJ: What kind of discussion did this project provoke?

Our intention was always to specify a high degree of atmosphere while leaving a large amount to chance.AM: There were a wide range of responses. One aspect of the project that was foregrounded were the 8- foot long section - oblique drawings which showed a large swath of the program events and other miscellany taking place in the project. Our response to this was that the project was very much a designed effort and took the research component away from what might be a well known form of production today - the manipulation of information into form. Our intention was always to specify a high degree of atmosphere while leaving a large amount to chance. We specified a long list of retailers, material conditions, but were most interested in the tension between the infrastructural generic condition and the possibility of something that could not be predicted. This ties into the nature of the images, as enticing or campaign material rather than as strict representation of the work.

CD: But for us, it was important to produce imagery that was a mixture of things taken directly from the city in which we were dealing. The accessibility of graphic content on various image- based forums, an amalgam of blogs that strive to deliver an idea of lifestyle or culture gave us the opportunity to utilize a wide variety of operations and effects like overlaying, scaling, transparency, live tracing, etc. to produce multiple permutations of images. The things that we produced were then introduced into selected spaces or isolated two dimensional extractions taken from a fully developed 3D model.







JJ: How did the problem of branding and marketing come into play? It seems like a substantial amount of the project was to think through how something like this can be captured in a convincing manner.

AM: Thinking through problems of branding, image-making, and other aspects of how architects can think like developers was interesting to us. We thought: how can Wal-Mart actually be persuaded to take on something like this, so radically different from their typical architectural agenda. This was actually a really fascinating question, one that is hard to ask in school but worthwhile. If the project had two simultaneous audiences (the architecture community and the Gowanus Canal Redevelopment audience) then our goal was to address both. The two long section oblique drawings satisfy both audiences perhaps, because they reveal the world of the project similar to one of the cutaways of a cruise ship where the complexity of a monolithic object is revealed to have many disparate and interconnected parts, working synchronously.

CD: I think the representation was really a way for us to research, explore, modify and distort something that is very carefully postured. But I think the impact is perhaps most evidenced in the traditional architectural modes of drawing. Plans, sections, and axonometrics were awarded a great deal of cosmetic value which were meant to entice, provoke or suggest a spin.








JJ: Do you think Wal-Mart and other big box shops should adapt your line of thinking? Do you plan to proposition your project to Wal-Mart as an alternative proposal for their standard modus operandi?

I would love to see a dramatic shift in Wal-Mart's retail model - a remix of their configuration.AM: I would not go so far as to say that they would adapt. If you look at European big box stores such as Baumax-x by njiric and nirjic they are already trying the figure out how architecture can participate in their concerns, IKEA in the past five years asked MVRDV to do a research study of how to site their store in urban environments. Stores like Wal-Mart have traditionally had trouble fitting into places like the Gowanus or Brooklyn in general. I would say it’s an ongoing research project that has potential to grow. In terms of proposing to Wal-Mart formally, we don’t have actual plans at this point but are certainly interested in thinking through problems of this nature.

CD: I think the expansion of architecture's participation in the many facets of society is very exciting. I would love to see a dramatic shift in Wal-Mart's retail model - a remix of their configuration. The company has made certain changes with respect to product display, the introduction of natural daylight in their deep floor plans with overhead sky lights but has yet to shake up its very rigid customs of opaque enclosure, parking, and a completely horizontal organization.

Left: Bird's Eye View of the Wal-(medley mixed-up mélange montage mash-up shopping)mart

Related Links:
Yale School of Architecture
Keller Easterling
Cody Davis

Designers: Alexander Maymind & Cody Davis