If you set out to deliberately build an unsustainable retailing structure, you could hardly do worse than the big box store. Unattractive, surrounded by acres of parking lots, and closed off from the outside world, the big box store comes close to violating every rule of sustainable and beautiful building. It is a sad legacy of the move to the suburbs.
It becomes even worse when it fails. Stores close, developers abandon it and move on, and it becomes a ghost. (See the three-part series in this blog on Dead Spaces: Part I; Part 2; Part 3.) The ghosts of big box stores complicate water runoff, contribute to climate change even when no one uses the parking lot, and are even more ugly than their live big box cousins.
In the long run, the big box store will almost certainly succumb to rising fuel prices and environmental constraints. The major question is what to do with the buildings and parking lots that remain when a big box store is abandoned. Tearing it down is one possibility, but this is both unimaginative and (because of the building materials used in most big box structures) hazardous to the environment.
Now the Washington Post has assembled a team of artists, architects, engineers, and developers to come up with creative suggestions for recycling these dead spaces. The article by Joel Garreau, repays study. The Post's team has some imaginative suggestions, with artists' renderings that bring them to life.
One doesn't have to agree with all the suggestions to see that this is a good start toward resolving an issue that we face even as I write and will face more urgently in the future.
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