Abandoned Amusement/Fun Parks

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Different things would apply in the case of the rare downtown mall obviously. Columbus OH tore theirs down just a few years back (having built it in the 80s to compete with the suburban malls). Not as unattractive of a parcel of land, but also the downtown is already kind of saturated with office space and is only in its first years of becoming attractive to yuppies and building new housing and so on. The city bought it back in the 2000s after basically threatening to evict the current management/ownership on the grounds that they were incompetent to the point of negligence (by this point it was a definitively dead mall). They kept the well-used parking garage and tore down the mall to make a "commons," which at the time appeared to be basically a holding action: develop it in a low-impact way, leaving it open for the machinations of the next smooth talker to sail into town with a strawboater and a song.

Kind of amazingly, some (admittedly undistinguished) new buildings have gone up on the flanking, street-side parcels, though they don't use their park frontage as effectively as they might. They suggest that the property might in fact remain a viable "central park" as downtown continues to yuppify and fill in its many, many parking lots and missing teeth. (There are bigger, arguably better parks not far away, but the density goes way down and the parking lot quantity goes way up thataway). Who knows, in twenty years the mall dying might prove to be the best thing to ever happen to the city.

Doctor Casino, Thursday, 30 April 2015 15:47 (eight years ago) link

I was at the light this morning looking at this very worn-out Pizza Hut, wondering how they stay in business.

http://i.imgur.com/vXFLma1.png

And like the Waffle House next door that got turned into a Chinese restaurant, Pizza Huts are notorious for being transformed into other places of business. In 2035, will we be driving past "the old Chipotle that's now an insurance office" or saying "You can tell that it was a Chik-fil-A, the waiting room is where the playground used to be."

pplains, Thursday, 30 April 2015 15:56 (eight years ago) link

http://notfoolinganybody.com/?indexPost=1058 glad to see this site is still going (I think)?

Doctor Casino, Thursday, 30 April 2015 16:00 (eight years ago) link

We have a KFC turned into an independent Mexican sit-down restaurant up the street. It looks a ton better, but was probably the worst Mexican food I've ever eaten.

how's life, Thursday, 30 April 2015 16:40 (eight years ago) link

it's going to take me a while to digest all that but in the meantime if you're into malls you gotta know about this guy! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_J._DeBartolo,_Sr.

Florianne Fracke (La Lechera), Thursday, 30 April 2015 17:23 (eight years ago) link

I think the best idea for redeveloping a mall would be a school. You've got rooms, wiring, parking, food prep areas, communal areas. Why not turn it into a small college? Oh right because no one wants to build a college ;_;
The one where I work is a Frankenstein's monster of a building, part of which used to be a movie studio. We have large meetings there now.

Florianne Fracke (La Lechera), Friday, 1 May 2015 13:59 (eight years ago) link

two months pass...
five months pass...
one month passes...

Jean Renaudie/Studio Montrouge at the top - he did a lot of stuff in that vein, in some very industrial/Red neighborhoods; I've poked around the ones in Ivry-sur-Seine, pictured above, and Saint-Denis. Some apects strike me as very livable and fabulous, others very bleak and challenging, and others just kinda "there." The Cité des Etoiles, outside Lyon in a much greener setting, looks spectacular. Renaudie was IIRC an unreformed old commie and really 100% believed in what he was doing as a project for a better and more humane life for the working class. There was a monograph a few years ago which I remember enjoying even if I don't think it 100% clarified the payoff of all those triangular layouts beyond maximizing light/views/connection to the terraces. Wonder how the hell you occupy/furnish some of those spaces.

Having a very hard time seeing "modernist" next to Ricardo Bofill's 1980s work (the other two). They are almost textbook post-modernist, with the in-your-face classical allusions and general interest in playing with semiotic meaning (or telling "jokes") not to mention the framing of legible exterior space (courtyards) rather than objects sitting in a field. Some of the latter part certainly overlaps with late modernism but lumping them together with Émile Aillaud's towers in Nanterre (which are of similar date but a totally different 'generation' design-wise), as this article does, is a bit annoying. /architecturalhistorian

shandemonium padawan (Doctor Casino), Wednesday, 17 February 2016 17:06 (eight years ago) link

nine months pass...
two years pass...

!!!!

Uptown VONC (Le Bateau Ivre), Tuesday, 12 March 2019 13:43 (five years ago) link

amazing that these clone-stamped mcmansioncastles somehow failed to set the turkish housing market alight

kiss me dadly (bizarro gazzara), Tuesday, 12 March 2019 13:49 (five years ago) link

The proportions are so strange.

Stoop Crone (Trayce), Wednesday, 13 March 2019 03:36 (five years ago) link

Reminds me of those Chinese imitation euro towns no one would actually live in.

Stoop Crone (Trayce), Wednesday, 13 March 2019 03:40 (five years ago) link

three years pass...

Appropriately, this thread is filled with dead links and abandoned websites.

more difficult than I look (Aimless), Saturday, 9 April 2022 00:39 (two years ago) link


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