Consumed,Repurpose-Driven Life - NYTimes.com
America’s shopping infrastructure is vast and abundant. That’s the problem.
Article in the New York Times about the shopping mall crisis in the USA mentions the photography of Julia Christensen (above) which documents the conversions of big-box stores in the Big Box Reuse book and BigBoxReuse website and a new book “Retrofitting Suburbia,” by Ellen Dunham-Jones...
A similar book worth mentioning is Rem Koolhaas and his students work at Harvard called "The Harvard Guide to Shopping" .. if you can get your hands on a copy. $112 and up on Amazon. We happened to read the intro to Koolhass' "S, M, L, XL" in Vito Acconci's "Aesthetics of Information class" (Spring 08) and we also read a criticism of his books by Hal Foster in Siebren Versteeg's "Workshop in Design History" (Spring 08)
In regards to re-purposing and mix-use space, here is a film by an artist friend of mine Hatuey Ramos-Fermin, which documents a special mix-use space in Holland.
Coexistence: "Since the year 2000 this Latin American migrants pentecostal church shares their worship space with a ping pong club in Amsterdam. Each weekend they transform the space."
Finally, this is a great little guide book from architects(?) Atelier Bow-Wow in Japan called "Made in Tokyo"... It's an index of all the uniqueness of Tokyo's architectural condition, that is very little space...
