As I prep for a much longer, photo-heavy blog article, I offer this brief filler, with a new take on some familiar material: a declining, heavily vacant strip mall in a suburban area, this time in metro DC (the Maryland side).We’ve all been here before: these days, blighted strip malls are just as common in
Long a means of securing seasonal tenants in shopping centers, the pop-up shop has only emerged as a standard bearer for retail nodes within the last five years or so—about the same time that economic forecasters began realizing how badly online shopping was undermining conventional bricks-and-mortar retail. And that’s how they work: they fill a
While this article treads across some familiar territory—dead and dying malls—it arrives through a different lens: the eyes of a friend and fellow devotee of interesting landscapes. I blogged many years ago about Sandusky—specifically an unusual Value City Furniture in the heart of downtown—but I spent very little time in the area that one would
The store featured in the image below isn’t likely all too familiar to many Americans, but it’s possible that it soon will be. As far as I know, it’s the pilot location for a convenience-oriented spinoff of Lidl (rhymes with “needle”), a long-successful German grocer that has been scoping the American market for a point
The ubiquity of Starbucks locations in America’s dense urban centers is a running joke, and it’s not even a new one. The insufferable yuppie couple of the 2000 movie Best in Show famously joked about it: “We met at a Starbucks…not the same Starbucks. But we saw each other at different Starbucks across the street.”
An evening stroll along the busy main drag in the Washington DC neighborhood of Mount Pleasant reveals the luminescence of a vertically oriented neon sign advertising a business, with four simple letters: “ELLE”. While hardly the stuff of Vegas, it’s distinctive on its own terms, because it belongs to a style infrequently seen on today’s
Multiple times in the past I’ve compared building design to clothing styles, and while such an analogy may gall both architects and fashion designers, I’m going to hold my ground on this one. The two professions clearly fall within the discipline of design, and, as such, they rely heavily on the transitory nature of prevailing
Over the holidays I briefly visited my hometown of Indianapolis, and even more briefly made a stop to the Greenwood Park Mall, which was “my mall” growing up and a frequent subject of this blog in earlier years. Back then, I singled this mall out for its resilience, as other malls (in Indianapolis and across
It is completely unreasonable for me to use license plate background art as a synecdoche for a state’s prevailing ethos, but I’m going to do it anyway. Why not? The design of a license plate is broadly attempting to achieve this effect, more so than even a flag. Whether license plates originally intended this or
By this point, it’s not unusual to encounter a series of trash receptacles in public places, each with distinct labels, allowing passers-by to sort and separate recyclable from non-recyclable waste. On a college campus, it would be far more surprising if a row of receptacles weren’t standing sentinel at every prominent node; the opportunity to
As I prep for a much longer, photo-heavy blog article, I offer this brief filler, with a new take on some familiar material: a declining, heavily vacant strip mall in a suburban area,
Long a means of securing seasonal tenants in shopping centers, the pop-up shop has only emerged as a standard bearer for retail nodes within the last five years or so—about the same time
While this article treads across some familiar territory—dead and dying malls—it arrives through a different lens: the eyes of a friend and fellow devotee of interesting landscapes. I blogged many years ago about
The store featured in the image below isn’t likely all too familiar to many Americans, but it’s possible that it soon will be. As far as I know, it’s the pilot location for
The ubiquity of Starbucks locations in America’s dense urban centers is a running joke, and it’s not even a new one. The insufferable yuppie couple of the 2000 movie Best in Show famously
An evening stroll along the busy main drag in the Washington DC neighborhood of Mount Pleasant reveals the luminescence of a vertically oriented neon sign advertising a business, with four simple letters: “ELLE”.
Multiple times in the past I’ve compared building design to clothing styles, and while such an analogy may gall both architects and fashion designers, I’m going to hold my ground on this one.
Over the holidays I briefly visited my hometown of Indianapolis, and even more briefly made a stop to the Greenwood Park Mall, which was “my mall” growing up and a frequent subject of
It is completely unreasonable for me to use license plate background art as a synecdoche for a state’s prevailing ethos, but I’m going to do it anyway. Why not? The design of a
By this point, it’s not unusual to encounter a series of trash receptacles in public places, each with distinct labels, allowing passers-by to sort and separate recyclable from non-recyclable waste. On a college