As strange as a recent viral project in Milwaukee may seem, there’s a historical precedent for this kind of adaptive reuse—but that doesn’t mean it’s always done right.
If you’re of the Gen X or Millennial generations, chances are, much of your youth was spent at the mall: buying Beanie Babies at Scoops!, eating at the food court, or accompanying your parents to Sears. For nearly 70 years, shopping malls were an important part of community life in many cities and suburbs—yet, of around 2,500 malls that existed in 1980, only 700 remained as of 2023, according to Costar. For many Americans, this means central places of gathering and commerce have declined to the point where their abandoned interiors have made for excellent ruin porn.
But these massive structures are also seeing a rebirth as a much-needed entity: housing. In October this year, a tweet by developer Zach Molzer made the rounds that featured a mall-to-housing conversion in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Called The Arcade, the project converted the Grand Avenue Mall (which opened in 1982) into new retail and office space and an adjoining, historic mall called the Plankinton Arcade (built in 1925) into 54 market-rate apartment units and amenities. It seemed an exciting adaptive reuse project, preserving two hulking structures and transforming them into housing in a city that, per the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, has the second-lowest supply of homes among major metro areas. The project used historic tax credits (as the arcade is included on the National Register) and was completed in 2019. But the October tweet raised some brows: One user responded simply with, "white collar jail."
Yet this project isn’t unprecedented, according to architecture critic and author Alexandra Lange. She spent several years researching malls for her book Meet Me at the Fountain (Bloomsbury, 2022), which documents the rise of malls as important architectural and communal spaces. Dwell spoke with Lange to understand why malls are enticing housing opportunities, and how we might interpret their functions to encourage smart re-use.
Let’s start with your book, Meet Me at the Fountain. Why focus on malls?
I am a child of the 1980s and I grew up primarily in Durham, North Carolina—the "new South" is prime mall territory. Malls are definitely a part of my own adolescence, and as I grew up, I found that my experience was pretty much universal for anyone that didn’t grow up in a big city. My interest in writing about architecture has always been to speak to the widest possible audience and to talk about architecture that everyone has encountered. Everyone has been to the mall, but everyone thought of the mall as kind of having happened yesterday. But in fact, by the early 20th century, malls were 50, 60, now 70 years old. They are historical artifacts and they do have a very long and rich history.
Describe the design typology of a mall. What does one expect to encounter in a typical mall design-wise?
Unlike most architecture, malls don’t have an interesting outside. Often, the indexical picture of any building is the entryway and malls don’t have good entrances by and large. They don’t have a lot on the outside and this is on purpose. Some of the early malls designed by Victor Gruen and others in the 1950s had more elaborate exterior detailing. But the developers soon found that didn't pay, and they became large, concrete boxes. The important part of the mall is on the inside and generally centers on the atrium. I usually use letters to describe the classic mall plans. And then in the simplest mall, you can go left or right, and at the end of two arms is a department store—typically one is a higher-end department store, and one will be a lower-end. It’s the longest ‘I shape.’ And later you get an ‘L shape’ with three department stores; an ‘F shape’ when later they add on another branch like a movie theater. You can get an ‘E shape’ with two branches. You can get a ‘V shape’ when they kind of angle those two arms. Having those letter plans in your mind helps people to orient themselves.
A lot of them have now shuttered. Malls have declined—why is it that they’re now becoming an enticing housing solution?
The reason that these malls are prime targets for reinterpretation, reinvestment, and renovation is that we don’t have a retail problem—we have a housing problem, especially in inner-ring suburbs built in the 1950s and ’60s that have the older malls that haven't been doing as well. I think there’s a great desire to say, Okay, we have a giant empty building. Let’s just make it housing. But in fact, for a lot of structural reasons, I'm not sure that is a worthwhile investment. I think a much smarter strategy, which is something that they’re doing even at successful malls like Garden State Plaza, is to take some of that parking lot space, build new housing in the parking lot that has windows and lots of bathrooms, and then try to convert the mall into retail to serve that new housing. It’s more day-to-day, Main Street, weekly shopping retail like a liquor store, a gourmet grocery store, a food court where you can bring food home, a movie theater. So really, going back to the roots of the mall as a community service and trying to work it in with newly built housing.
I’m wondering if you’ve seen the Milwaukee mall-to-housing conversion that made its way across Twitter, and what you thought of it.
It’s not the first straight mall-to-housing conversion that I’ve seen. I think one of the most famous ones is the Providence Arcade. Arcades are a precursor of the mall, and the Providence Arcade is one of the first ones in the U.S. that was converted to housing some years ago, with micro apartments facing into a long, narrow internal atrium. The Milwaukee project is very similar to that in a number of ways. The Milwaukee mall is downtown, not a suburban mall in the middle of a parking lot. And it also has a sky lit atrium. One of the largest problems in converting a mall to housing is that malls are designed with no windows; how do you make a humane apartment in a mall? In these one-to-one conversions, they’re using the internal sky-lit atrium as the ‘daylight’—I personally consider that hugely problematic from the point of view of humanity and people's needs.
The other issue often with these conversions is that there isn’t enough plumbing to re-plumb each unit so that every single store (unit) has plumbing and a kitchen. It requires a tremendous amount of resources because they’re just not built for human habitation. The Milwaukee conversion also uses a store window as a home office, which is dystopian. I can imagine a film in which you see all of these singletons typing away on their laptops in their exposed home offices along the mall core—that seems like a really grim eventuality.
Are there case studies of mall-to-housing conversions that you like?
Garden State Plaza, also called the Westfield Transformation, in New Jersey is probably the best example. The area has a lot of malls and corporate campuses and New Jersey recently wrote a new law to make it easier to convert both malls and corporate campuses into different uses, releasing these suburban districts from their single-use zoning in order to get new development on these sites. So they’re taking a successful mall and building housing around it, and also some green space, co-working space, and other things. I think this could be really successful because it’s basically saying that not everybody is commuting from our suburb to New York anymore, or to other cities in New Jersey; lots of people just want to live here, have a separate workspace, be able to walk to shops, and we can make this new town on the footprint of the mall.
What was most fascinating about the Milwaukee project is that it utilized historic tax credits, which seems odd considering that, in some ways, malls might be older but they aren’t that architecturally interesting as buildings, as you mentioned.
A great example of using historic tax credits, actually, is to convert a corporate campus into a mall. The former Bell Labs campus in Holmdel, New Jersey, which is now Bell Works—an Eero Saarinen building built for Bell—has now been made into a combination small marketplace and co-working space that's been very successful. They used historic tax credits and preserved all of the great high modernist details. That building was very obviously historical, because it was designed by Saarinen. These malls we’re talking about are not designed by somebody famous, and so I think it becomes a little trickier to argue for their importance. Hopefully, my book and the work of organizations like Docomomo (which recently had malls as their theme of the year) serve to historicize the mall and will then help individual communities to be able to argue, yes, this mall was important; it was the first mall built in a community; all of these important things happened there, etcetera. That helps them get those tax credits and then convert it also into something that can have continued community importance. I really emphasize this in my book: yes, the mall is a capitalist enterprise, but it has all of these important community functions that people still really need.
Alexandra Lange’s next book, Making Do, addressing the architecture and DIY culture of the 1970s, is forthcoming from Bloomsbury in 2027.
Top photo courtesy of Westfield Garden State Plaza.
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