The Best Dead Mall?
A Photographic Documentation and Indefinite
Installation
Dixie Square Mall, Illinois.
- CLUI photo by Steve Rowell
An exhibit about one of the most dramatic dead
malls in the country was on display at the CLUI this summer. The
electronic presentation, created by Steve Rowell of the CLUI,
was entitled The Best Dead Mall in America: A Photographic Documentation
of the Dixie Square Mall in Harvey, Illinois [ more
info ]. Located 20 miles south of downtown Chicago, the 800,000
square-foot mall has been abandoned for over 23 years, and in
that time, the mall has been transformed into a new kind of post-shopping
experience.
From the outside the general form of the mall appears intact,
and all of the rambling megastructure is still standing and is
navigable. Faceted facades and colored wall treatments subtly
echo the anchor stores at the ends (that type of brick –
must have been a Sears; those vertical stylings – Montgomery
Ward?). The shape of the structure is more difficult to discern
than it once was, as a new growth forest of trees is doing well
in the parking lot, plazas, and alcoves around the outside of
the building, breaking through asphalt, and overgrowing out of
planters. Behind the rusty cyclone, the garden center has finally
gone to seed.
Inside the unlocked or doorless doorways is a space beyond the
language of design. Surprising and exotic textures and forms are
visible within the faint remnants of the familiar commercial layouts
of the 1970’s branded spaces. The interior lighting, natural,
haphazard, and high contrast, brings full visibility to some spaces,
while others remain occluded and mysterious, where senses other
than sight are summoned to experience the space. A true manifestation
of a deconstructed architecture, inside veneer exfoliates, panels
peel, and drop ceilings drop. Holes appear, and spread, giving
angular views of the structural layers.
This “dead” mall is actually more alive than many
of its living counterparts: the building lives through its continuous
transformation and integration with its surroundings. Visitors
are free to interact with the space, to make modifications, adjustments,
renovations, as they see fit, and to make it their own, if only
for indefinate moments. Organic matter lives and thrives, especially
in the random atriums formed by the partial roof collapses. Grids
of floor tile are covered in carpets of moss, with flooded puddles,
which resemble a landscape of forests and lakes seen from above,
teasing one’s sense of scale and cartesian formality.
This is an inside out architecture, where full trees have reclaimed
some of the interior space, breaking through the linoleum and
the concrete floors, and where drifts of snow are free to migrate
through the corridors as far as they can, and hallways become
avenues of ice. Conversely, some of the interior materials have
begun to spill out the service doors and other apertures, a belching
of soaked drywall, carpet, mattresses, old appliances, display
cabinets, bringing some of the inside out to the exterior spaces.
Dixie Square Mall, Illinois. North face (winter.)
- CLUI photo by Steve Rowell
Dixie Square Mall, Illinois. North face detail
(summer.)
- CLUI photo by Steve Rowell
And to top it off, there is a layer of artificial
construction and destruction, subtly and indelibly merged with
the existing history, further complicating the archeology of the
place: in 1980, a year after the mall closed, it was refashioned
for a film shoot, for a film that involved the destructive highspeed
perusal of the shops along its interior corridors. As the police
chase the Blues Brothers’ renegade police car through the
mall, Elwood casually comments on the new fashions, then steers
the car through another row of plate glass.
Dead Mall in Dead Mall
Part of the Dead Mall display in the Dead
Mall.
- CLUIphoto by Deborah Stratman
Amidst the mostly incidental displays
within the Dixie Square Mall, visitors may find the exhibit for
the Dead Mall design competition, that was hosted by the Los Angeles
Forum for Architecture and Urban Design (www.laforum.org)
during Fall of 2002 and the Spring of 2003, and supported by the
National Endowment for the Arts. As part of this Dead Mall landmark,
copies of the Dead Mall competition prints have been installed
on selected flat surfaces within the mall, and have become part
of the surficial material of the mall interior. While not officially
open to the public, the exhibit will, like the mall itself, be
on display indefinitely.
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