Adam Miller + Laura Peterson

“Retail Therapy: Post-Consumerist Housing for the Dead Mall” 

As of 2021, malls in the U.S. registered 911.6 million square feet of area, with a vacancy of 8.3% and a projected additional 80,000-100,000 retail stores to close by 2025. Chicago accounts for 5.3% of the total retail vacancies within the U.S. The sheer quantity of vacant mall space combined with the need for affordable and inclusive housing collectives suggests the American Mall as an opportunity to repurpose cultural commercial centers into multi-functional cultural housing collectives.

The mall is dead (save the mall!). Sited within the suburban landscape of Chicago, Illinois, the dead suburban mall became the adaptive reuse catalyst site for Retail Therapy’s housing collectives. The studio proposed (3) frameworks towards housing resilience:

1. Something Old + Something New. Participants carefully selected what to keep and what to add within a partly vacant, but still center-of-town mall on the outskirts of Chicago as they designed their adaptive reuse housing collective proposals.

2. Small to Big + Inside-Outside. Retail Therapy kicked off with the design of a domestic-furniture-object, scaling up to the room then to building systems, and finally zooming out to the scale of the mall. Opposing the outside-in, for-profit housing models, participants investigated the bodies, objects and collectives we live and could live with.

3. Intersectional + Interdisciplinary. Participants created memes, oversized furniture- objects, flipbooks and films. Foregrounding research, physical making and personal social experiences as a way to explore ideas about intersectional, resilient and performative housing collectives, each project explored the urgent need for kinships and desires beyond the current and often isolating market-driven collective housing models.