Today Williston—which sits atop the oil-rich Bakken shale formation—is enjoying a second life as a key player in the state's booming economy. Following several years of record population growth and real estate development, the town will soon boast one more draw: a $500 million retail mecca complete with shopping, a hotel and indoor water park. Not bad for a town of just 32,000 people. [...]

"The U.S. isn't overretailed, it's under-idea-ed" — cnbc.com

For a fledgling startup, finding an office in San Francisco can be a real nightmare. Rents are now climbing past $60 a square foot, second only to Manhattan in the US [...].

This means young startups have to get creative if they insist on staying within the city. And Westfield, one of the world’s largest mall operators, has a solution for them: Bespoke, a 37,000-square-foot coworking and event space within its shopping center in downtown San Francisco. — qz.com

Dubai is already home to the biggest shopping mall in the world, but that apparently isn't enough.

The emirate is planning an even bigger mall, one so massive it's already being described as a temperature-controlled city. It's going to be called Mall of the World, and will stretch for 48 million square feet.

The plan may seem curious to Americans watching their neighborhood shopping malls start to fade. — cbsnews.com

UNStudio has surely been on a roll in completing projects for the past few weeks. Ben van Berkel and co. recently finished the Hanjie Wanda Square at the Wuhan Central Culture Centre in Wuhan, China.

UNStudio's overall design for the facade and interior of the new luxury shopping plaza won a 2011 international competition. Using sophisticated yet simple materials, the plaza has sleek colors and dynamic patterns that are also a suitable match for its luxury retail features. — bustler.net

It's one of largest and most popular covered markets in the world -- but now management claims vendors have weakened the structure of Istanbul's Grand Bazaar to the point it may collapse. Merchants view the situation differently. — spiegel.de

Shopping malls around the country are dropping like flies. Roughly a third have trouble keeping the lights on. And estimates from Green Street Advisors suggest 10 percent of indoor malls will go dark within a decade, due to changing consumer tastes.

But some malls are putting up a fight, even with one foot in the grave. — marketplace.org

The New South China Mall was once promoted as the world's biggest mall, but it's now pretty much deserted. — edition.cnn.com

According to its architect Eric Kuhne, head designer at the multinational firm CivicArts, Bluewater is "a city rather than a retail destination". — Guardian

Gruen’s idea transformed American consumption patterns and much of the environment around us. At age 60, however, the enclosed regional shopping mall also appears to be an idea that has run its course — theatlanticcities.com

Designers in Buffalo have proposed stripping down a mall to its foundation and reinventing it as housing, while an aspiring architect in Detroit has proposed turning a mall’s parking lot there into a community farm. Columbus, Ohio, arguing that it was too expensive to maintain an empty mall on prime real estate, dismantled its City Center mall and replaced it with a park. — nytimes.com

Perhaps you have noticed that commercial architecture lining roads in Maryland and Virginia looks more or less the same and not much different from strip malls and boxy stores lining roads in Massachusetts, New Jersey, North Carolina, Texas, Ohio or Oregon. [...] Why do housing developments and retail shopping facilities look so much alike, given how much Americans value individuality, freedom of expression and independence? — washingtonpost.com

"It might have been easier to completely rebuild it," Rogers tells me. "It was a very weak structure with very thin walls. We had to shore the facade, then almost completely rebuild it inside. But the thing they insisted on, and I think they were proven right, was keeping the circular form, the historic form. It's not just a building – it's a piece of Barcelona." — Guardian