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After Wal-Mart
Big Box Reuse
by Julia Christensen
MIT Press, Cambridge, MA; 2008
231 pp; hardcover; 91 color illustrations; $29.95
ISBN 978-262-03379-4
Reviewed by Sallie Hood, Ron Sakal and Harold Henderson
Big boxes are here to stay, even when the retailers inside them aren’t. In a series of cross-country treks, artist and teacher Julia Christensen learned how abandoned Wal-Marts and K-Marts have been reused. Big Box Reuse (along with a companion web site) tells ten informative and troubling tales of how communities made the best of the remains.
Given that the author focuses on small towns and cities of the South and Midwest, these buildings’ diverse fates, while of great interest, are not necessarily representative:
Bardstown, KY: The building was demolished and replaced by a new county courthouse in the same parking lot.
Round Rock, TX: The building was reused as an indoor Go-Kart raceway, later replaced by a health-and-fitness strip mall.
Wisconsin Rapids, WI: The building was reused as a consolidated senior center.
Buffalo, NY, Charlotte, NC, and Laramie, WY: Buildings were converted into charter schools (the most common single reuse Christensen found).
Hastings, NE: The building was reused as a Head Start center.
Austin, MN: The building was reused as Hormel Foods offices and Spam Museum.
Lebanon, MO: The building was reused as a county library, museum and café.
Pinellas Park, FL: The building became a church.
Chalmette, LA: The parking lot was occupied by a collection of trailers serving as a health center. The building remains vacant.
Various Kentucky towns: On a temporary basis, the buildings became part of the Peddlers Mall chain of indoor flea markets.
Christensen admires the resourceful locals who championed these reclamation projects – in some cases raising dimes and dollars for them – but she doesn’t go overboard with the cheerleading. “Big box reuse offers quite a paradoxical quagmire,” she writes. On one hand, it’s green: “For every building that is reused, another building does not go up.” On the other hand, it’s repulsive: “Is this what we want our future landscape to look like?”
Christensen’s willingness to go and see is refreshing, and her report on the relocation of schools, hospitals, churches and museums into big boxes is important. As she says, this transformation has been going on “without documentation or collective, systematic thought.”
Big Box Reuse is an overdue discussion-starter. Unfortunately, it’s not much more than that. Its documentation is episodic, and the underlying thought more impressionistic than systematic. Christensen’s quirky approach does produce revealing vignettes: an improvident Go-Kart entrepreneur, senior citizens offering green beans from a community garden, and publicly-funded charter schools’ extraordinary fear of public accountability. But it fails to answer her own basic question. At book’s end the reader is somewhat better informed but still stuck in that “paradoxical quagmire.”
The author’s environmentalism is heartfelt but abstract and imprecise; she’s still thinking inside the box. Big boxes and their attendant parking lots have helped arrange our towns and cities so that we have to drive almost everywhere, aggravating multiple energy, environmental and social problems. Once abandoned, they could be made more neighborly – the paradox might be softened if not resolved – but that requires systematic thought and attention to the whole local context, not just the building.
Reuse can enhance the walkability and liveliness of the area, as Ellen Dunham-Jones and June Williamson explain in their brief but more sophisticated account in chapter four of the recently published Retrofitting Suburbia. In growing communities, the site can be reconnected to the rest of town, and the parking lot reclaimed for landscape, residential and small-scale commercial uses.
Unfortunately, Christensen and those she interviewed pay little attention to context and urban design. She takes local informants’ word for it that these buildings are located “right at the center of transport,” without recognizing that they’re only at the center for those who own cars, who can drive, and who can afford the fuel. Some towns actually avoided professional design assistance.
The chosen illustrations reflect this inattention. Bardstown’s new Nelson County Justice Center is always depicted in close-up, its neo-Georgian facade filling the frame. We read that it faces a three-acre parking lot, abutting a strip mall and an abandoned movie theater, but we don’t see it. This alleged reuse is only a mile from the old courthouse (now a tourist welcome center), but how walkable is that path? How does the site relate to the older parts of town? Were there ways to reuse the site other than comically plopping a dignified building into an asphalt wasteland? These questions are neither asked nor answered. In Bardstown the big box itself was demolished. What was preserved and reused were the worst things about it: its location and its built-in dependence on automobiles.
Context is sometimes mentioned but largely neglected in the other stories. Christensen writes that the Wisconsin Rapids Wal-Mart “had anchored the Rapids Mall downtown” during the 1980s before leaving to build bigger on the outskirts. Surely a big box in downtown poses different issues from one out on the edge, yet the story of its replacement by a senior center includes no map of the town. The reader is left to wonder whether Wal-Mart ruined the downtown by arriving – or by leaving!
Using web tools, we looked more closely at Bardstown, Wisconsin Rapids and other sites. Walkscore.com – a rough measure of how many basic needs can be met within walking distance of a given address – gives Bardstown’s old courthouse an excellent walkscore of 91 out of 100. The new justice center scores only 57. This is not a paradoxical quagmire, it is municipal suicide. The Wisconsin Rapids senior center has a better walkscore, but Google Maps reveals its pedestrian-unfriendly surroundings, and it remains cut off from the river that flows nearby.
Big boxes are commercial successes (a fact Christensen neglects to acknowledge) as well as architectural and urban-design disasters. Reuse can be a chance for towns and cities to get it right. But to do so they need to be conscious of the context as well as the building, they need to envision replacing asphalt with a real neighborhood, and they need knowledgeable design professionals who will listen and help. TB
Sallie Hood and Ron Sakal are principals of Sakal & Hood Architecture and Urban Design in Chicago, IL. They are co-founders of the Center for Building Communities, a multidisciplinary university research center at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, IN, where Hood is Director of Design and Sakal is Executive Director. Harold Henderson, CBC Director of Communications, contributed to this article. CBC studios are funded in part by Champion Enterprises, Inc.
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