Serial Vision Space Planning Revolution

“In thinking about the interior design of malls, I was heavily influ¬ enced by a small but powerful book called Townscape, by the British ar¬ chitect and editor Gordon Cullen. First published in 1961, it should be required reading for every developer, architect, urban planner, and zoning official. Cullen introduced me to the importance of serial vision in planning productive, stimulating space. It’s not that I didn’t think about these things before reading Cullen’s book. In fact, I’m cursed or blessed with what some have called “third-dimensional’’ or “parallax” vision. With essentially every object or vista I see, I think about how it could be better. Not just different. Better. But Cullen captured these hard-to-describe concepts in understandable, almost poetic language. Here is his paragraph on optics from the introduc¬ tion to Townscape: Let us suppose that we are walking through a town: here is a straight road off which is a courtyard, at the far side of which another street leads out and bends slightly before reaching a monument. Not very un¬ usual. We take the path and our first view is that of the street. Upon turning into the courtyard the new view is revealed instantaneously at the point of turning, and this view remains with us whilst we walk across the courtyard. Leaving the courtyard we enter the further street. Again a new view is suddenly revealed although we are traveling at a uniform speed. Finally as the road bends the monument swings into view. The significance of all this is that although the pedestrian walks through the town at a uniform speed, the scenery of towns is often re¬ vealed in a series of jerks and revelations. This we call SERIAL VISION.”

“The key to creating 100 percent locations is moving customers ef¬ fectively through our space. With inexpensive suburban land costs, it would have been cheaper (in construction expense) to spread out all the tenants on one level between potent department store anchors. But we took da Vinci’s warnings to heart, and stacked the stores on two levels, creating mall corridors between the anchor department stores of around 1,000 feet, a comfortable stroll of three city blocks. We punched holes in the upper floor, allowing customers to see the stores on both levels and encouraging shopping on both sides of the corridor—retail “undulation” that would be impossible along a busy urban street. We also installed clear handrails on the upper level to preserve unobstructed sight lines, and placed vertical transportation systems (escalators and elevators) on the ends of the mall corridors to create a balanced flow of customers past every store. To test the ef¬ fectiveness of these measures, at Southridge, a center we opened near Milwaukee in 1970, we gave incentives to a candy store and a hosiery store—two impulse operations—to open one store on the upper level at one end and an identical store at the lower level on the other end. We tracked each operation’s sales and found that the stores ran within 4 to 5 percent of each other per month. That showed we could equalize traffic through external and internal control.”