We live in a time when it is increasingly difficult for architects to make definitive claims with any kind of certainty, yet they are constantly challenging themselves by proclaiming that architecture is dead, cities are dead, malls are dead, dead is dead. It is a proclamation that, while almost Futurist in its ambitions, too often inspires only anemic responses to more profound problems within a rapidly changing public realm. The current institutionalized regional mall strategy has narrowed the bandwidth of retail programming and social interaction to that of lifestyle branding. We live in a time when the public sphere has shrunk, been compressed, annihilated, and themed to the point of bankruptcy. What lies beyond the overexposed city? For us there is no progress in renovation, retheming, or refacading. There is only potential in re-thinking.

We propose a mall that rethinks its relationship with the city. Rejecting the traditional catchment typology, our mall engineers an emergent model of hyper-urbanism. The total void of scenaric thinking in the organization of social life prevents urbanism from rising to the level of creation-innovation. We are interested in forming, through the FANTASTIC act of architecture, an emergent and robust social life in the form of a MALL.