My undergraduate thesis exploring the role the Market Square Shopping Centre played in re-imagining the downtown of Kitchener, Ontario has been published by the online literary magazine Numero Cinq! The Struggle for the Centre: One City’s Adventure With Modernity
Kitchener’s recent downtown renewal seems to have genuinely turned around the atmosphere there. The new wider sidewalks with sloped curbs not only make the sidewalks more pedestrian friendly, they also make the roadways less daunting as well. J-walking has become much easier because of the reduced distance between sidewalks and the slower speed of cars […]
So as I mentioned in my last post, three confederates and I travelled from the Southern reaches of this province to the lands Northeast of its capital between Christmas and New Years day. Chatham was our first true stop on the journey, and its downtown mall was very much what I expected. Downtown Chatham Centre shares many […]
Yesterday I made a site visit to the Market Square in Kitchener, Ontario. In my mind it’s the poster-child of my thesis, since it was the first mall of its kind that I ever knew. I was able to get photographs not only of the general mall area, but also of the Goodlife Fitness and The Record. It gives a good sense of the ways that the space can be reused and also alerted me to the stark difference between the mall’s architecture and the architecture of its anchor (once an Eaton’s department store).
I recently dug up an article called “Labyrinthine Design” by Henry Petroski I read last year in Exhibitions: Processes, Procedures, Pragmatics. One of the different types of labyrinths Petroski discusses is the grocery store. Granted, there are of course differences between a grocery store and a shopping mall, but I thought his description of the […]