A Dead Mall's Fantasy
An allegory of consumerism
Undergraduate Thesis
Studio 5
What is real & what is an image? We live in a world often confusing, mediated by images dictating our truths and reality. Obsessed by the consumerist imagery, we become what we consume. This treachery, that is the control on consumption and the colossal amounts of waste generated by us; lie behind the capitalist image. ‘A Dead Mall’s Fantasy’ is an excavation of the realities of a post-consumption realm and turns the metaphor of the mall upside-down. The shopping mall that was once envisaged as a space of performance and glam, celebrates its own death with the aftermath of our consumerist lifestyles. The hypothesis takes one of the oldest malls - Citi Mall in Mumbai and turns the dead mall into a Recycling facility and a Data center. An architectural subversion that provokes a question about our consumerist lifestyles.
What happens to the mall when it recycles the heaps of waste generated yet also becomes a mode to facilitate our digitized consumerist lifestyles? The spectacle of consumerism now generates use-value as infrastructure, mutating and evolving with the city.
The project isn't a case of a distant dystopia nor an imagination of a neo-mall, it is only a mere reflection of society. A Post-Anthropocene of the early 21st century consumerism - where products that once left the atrium come back to be recycled and the bodies once gratified in the cold colorful aisles, disintegrate into the web.
Mumbai, India - 2021
Mentors - Nemish Shah & Rohan Shivkumar
Every piece of information consumed by us,
is layered with consumerism
Be it an article, a film, a short video or even the music we listen to is bombarded with ads at every junction. That’s how the Neo-Economy of Attention functions. Each advertisement watched / clicked on is recorded on one’s dataset like a log sheet. All that information is collected, collated and sold to a chain of companies which then sell it to other chains and so on and so forth, in an almost endless loop. Our identities sold at the cost of our privacy.
You are what you consume
With the heavy consumption of products and information all around us via different channels. We constantly seem to perform a identity built up of the things we don ourselves with. This very internet becomes a space of performance for our abstracted realities. A well - constructed, groomed spectacle representing one’s own self. Which really is far from the truth.
In a world mediated by images,
which image do you choose to perform?
We’re never sold the product,
only the idea
of the product.
Image Source - Meta / Instagram & Apple Inc
While the gap between the modes of production and product keeps growing
The new form of alienation goes even further by reducing the product to an image.
The spectacle cannot be understood as a mere visual deception produced by mass-media technologies. It is a worldview that has actually been materialised.
- Guy Debord, Society of Spectacle, 1967
Image Source - Verge
Post Consumption Landscapes
The Post consumption problem goes on to magnify the generation of colossal amounts of waste propelled by us. All of it stems from our hyper consumption patterns, the after effects of which is seen at the edges of our city.
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The state of Maharashtra produced on avg. highest amount of waste in India - up to 22,570 MT per day. Out of which the city of Mumbai alone produces 1/3 of it. The city currently has 2 active landfill sites and lined-up future Waste-to-energy proposal near the Deonar landfill.
Mumbai
7,500 mt
Per Day - Year 2019-20
7,500MT Solid Waste includes a
plethora of material like :
Paper
Metal
Organic Waste
Fabric
Glass
Construction Debris
Plastic
Maharashtra
22,570 mt
Per Day - Year 2019-20
Treachery of Consumption
Planned Obsolescence with a continuous bombardment of a percepted reality
A duality we live with everyday
Image Source - Scroll.in
Architecture of Consumerism
The dazzle of the Shopping Mall
The shopping mall becomes one such archetype of the contemporary time that represents the pinnacle of consumerism. A physical manifestation of India’s post liberalization aspirations made possible by the FDI’s.
A hyper - stylized imagination of modernity, a space for retail therapy in a contained and controlled environment that works like a machine to generate one’s own perceived identity.
Anchors
Eateries
Shops
Arcade
Main Circulation Cores
Circulation paths
Upon further study one finds the extensive science that goes behind the making of the mall. These structures are designed with this kind of control in mind.
Typical Layouts
The design of the mall thrives on its controlled movement patterns. Long circulation paths cutting across shops are designed only to entice us into consuming endlessly.
Inorbit Mall
Infiniti Mall
Grid
Freeform
Racetrack
Maze (IKEA)
Infiniti Mall -II
2011
Spencer Plaza
1985
MGF Mall
1998
Crossroads
1999
Ansal Plaza
1999
Inorbit Mall
2004
Infiniti Mall
2004
Citi Center Mall
2004
Palladium Mall
2007
Death of the mall
Over time though, this evolution led to the death of its own creation due to several reasons. Even before the pandemic, the malls had started seeing a sharp decline in their visitors mainly due to the decentralised online commercial industry of Amazon’s and Flipkart’s.
There is a rise of these large footprints laying derelict with no purpose or people in them. And the COVID Pandemic certainly has only accelerated this new mode of consumption.
- What happens to the mall post consumption?
- What is the relevance of this image that the consumerist architecture creates? What does the image mean to the city?
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the act of indulging with the commodity
The bodies that once participated in collective gratification, still happen in the same building only in 1’s and 0’s. Long cold aisles of servers mapping each ad click, still serving the same purpose but dehumanised in the physical space, participating in a larger phenomenon of surveilling capitalism. Machines recycling the colossal amounts of waste created by our discarded products bridging this vast alienation between the product and its manufacturing processes. Allowing a chain of a circular production process and a resourceful assemblage functioning within the city.
Site
From the study of the existing fabric of the dead and the functioning malls in the city of Mumbai, one of the oldest - buildings ‘Citi Mall’ was chosen.
1 Existing Scenario
2 Deconstructing the Mall
3 Bare RCC Structure
The intervention sits in the middle of the process - recycling the waste back to a resource in a circular process.
4 Dissecting the mall
programatically
5 Recycling facility Volumetric
inserts
6 Data Center Tower Volumes
6a Tower Volumes Permutation
7 External Support System
8 Thoroughfare Connector
9 Connector opening up the bottom
10 The absence of our bodies, becomes the afterlife of the mall
The columns marked in red show the existing and the additions made to the building are in black.
North
Ground Floor Plan
Saw Tooth Roof Detail
Wall Section A
For ease of functioning for the waste recycling facility vertically. Silos are added to the front face of the mall, which act as vertical storage systems for the waste turned- raw material.
Functioning of the Recycling Facility
Products that once left the atrium, come back to the same space - fractured
only to be recycled and sent back to production again
An image that holds a mirror to our civilization and questions our ideas of consumption. The thesis isn’t a case of a distant dystopia but only a speculative imagination of our identities and lived reality. The gears of these consumerist machines still run in sync with the way things are but today the mall tries to save and fix what it can and maybe that is ‘a dead mall’s fantasy.’