Providence Place
From the Providence Place website: “Providence Place is the ideal venue for tour de force shopping excursions, family outings and intimate rendezvous. With more than 170 stores, eight restaurants, and entertainment venues, you’ll find something for every age, taste and style.
This shopping, dining and entertainment destination is the centerpiece of a downtown Providence renaissance. The impressive line-up of retailers includes Nordstrom, Coach, The Apple Store, The Cheesecake Factory, Sephora, J. Jill, Sony Style, Ross-Simons, Build-A-Bear Workshop, Dave & Buster’s and Feinstein IMAX Theatre. With its stunning architecture, a downtown location, a lively streetscape and carpeted floors, Providence Place provides a one-of-a-kind shopping experience.”
We’re not here shopping or shilling for the mall, but it’s gratifying to see such a vibrant downtown. I wonder why it took us thirty-five years to find this city, only an hour from our house.
“Malls are what make America the greatest country in the world” (R.M. Nixon, 1973). Providence appears to be right there in the trail to greatness. But it’s hard to beat the glorious leader — the elephantine Mall of America in Minnesota.
Comment by rakkity — November 3, 2007 @ 1:27 am
Mike in a mall is so incongruous I can’t even grasp it. He MAY be challenging me, but whether to be more or less humble I can’t say … But it is an unexpected opportunity to be able to say that I did all the public lighting there, from the exterior to the foodcourt, and all the arcades. You can see some of the exterior on the architect’s site
and this site has the rendering the architects did under my “art direction” to show the owner what the lighting we proposed would look like.
Comment by adam — November 3, 2007 @ 7:56 am
Mike grew up in a mall…from tenth grade to college years, before that normal small town stores clustered together, and I think that’s why he can’t stay out of his local K-Mart. It takes me back, way back. Evansville had, and still does, a very respectable downtown, that wilted under the pressure of malls. A classic American paradigm. And even though they blocked off traffic and tried to make the downtown more mall-like, they still couldn’t really salvage those stores which do business for like a customer a day. My heart lies with unique.
The concept of malls I hate. All that senseless capitalism under one roof. But there’s nothing I can do about that and my fascination with people and shiny objects always gets the best of me. So Providence Place, which is all glitz and mostly high end stores (except for the upper level where I found a Radio Shack and the earphone I was searching for) plopped in the center of a vibrant, people-filled downtown, is groovy.
I am glad that my Escheresque escalator pics pushed me to make this post, which then gave Adam the opportunity to show off one of his job sites. Yeah, we’ve heard about his work through his death defying exploits, but this gives a much better overview. I wish he’d post his own photos of some of his jobs. After all, every time we walk outside and look up, we get to see rakkity’s workplace.
Btw, how long does it take to do the schematics, or whatever you call your lighting designs, for a building the size of about ten city blocks?
Comment by michael — November 3, 2007 @ 9:36 am
Coming up with the concepts, which do evolve over time, is the briefest part of any project. The basic exterior design came together in less than a week, that rendering mere days. The working documents, though — layouts, cuts, fixture schedule, all of which get issued many times — take architects months and months, our part but a subset. The real work is all the meetings discussing details, how to build things, jobsite meetings to review surprises and conflicts, etc., etc. We worked on that project for about 2 years, I think. I was shocked when I saw that final-product exterior photo, and how much it looks like the rendering, which happened first, very early on and long before anything was actually designed or specified.
WaterFire, I should note — the braziers in the water in the foreground in that exterior shot — is not our work but an annual city event.
Comment by adam — November 3, 2007 @ 10:27 am
Adam, a lighting project like that sounds much like a satellite project. Basic design (and science), schematics, engineering, meetings, surprises, conflicts,… and a couple of years later, launch into orbit. Of course, there may be many years previous to the start of design–grant applications, funding issues, competition, but the Providence Mall would have had all that too.
Comment by rakkity — November 3, 2007 @ 11:39 am
How many billable hours?
Comment by michael — November 3, 2007 @ 12:43 pm
A satellite’s probably 10,000 times the effort per volume or weight, Rakk, but a whole lot easier to get into orbit …
Mike, I have no idea now — we started mid ’97 and it was finished late 2002, I think. I’d hazard a guess at 300 hours or so … For the architects, who started long before we became involved, probably 200x that, or more.
Comment by adam — November 3, 2007 @ 12:52 pm
I’m mall-deprived. LA, at least in the 40s & 50s when I grew up there, had no malls atall. I was forced to survive at Mom & Pop comic book stores and the odd 5 & 10. Then when I went to Santa Clara to college, I saw no malls either. There may have been some, but my only off-campus ventures were to pizza & beer places where they didn’t check your ID too carefully. In Champaign-Urbana (UofI 1963-64), I never saw a mall either. Finally, when I to Boulder in ’65, I discovered the Pearl St Mall . I’ve mainly been disappointed with malls ever since (with the exception of the National Mall in Washingon, DC).
Comment by rakkity — November 3, 2007 @ 5:28 pm
Have you been to Burlington, VT, rakkity? I think you’d like their mall. Not to be confused with the Burlington Mall (in Burlington, MA)!
Comment by Jennifer — November 3, 2007 @ 6:39 pm
I’ve only been to Burlington once, and that was in the middle of winter (1977 or 78) when it was around 0 degrees out. I recall seeing Lake Champlain all frozen over with ice-fishing houses scattered about, but we were mainly there to go XC-skiing with my old buddy Captain Phil. So I don’t recall the downtown at all, but on other trips to Vermont towns, I’ve been impressed with the New-Englandy character of the downtowns, so I suspect that Burlington has maintained the NE character in their “mall”.
Comment by rakkity — November 3, 2007 @ 7:06 pm
Pretty cool link buried in that linked Pearl St. Mall site, Rakk — http://360vr.com/pearl11 . Takes Quicktime to run it, but puts our camping panos to shame. You should do that for us amongst the elk sometime … ! (With sound … ) ; >)
Comment by el Kib — November 3, 2007 @ 10:02 pm
Yes, there are a lot of terrific 360s in there. Mike should get the equipment and post a 360 of one your favorite Maine lakes.
To do it with elk, you’d have to hide in a bush overnight and wait till the elk surrounded you in the morning. Possible, but I’m not fanatical enough.
Comment by rakkity — November 4, 2007 @ 4:18 pm