A Pre-Fab Little Town
How much of an improvement would it be for this to be standard?
Awhile ago in one of my “things I’d like to write in the coming year” roundups, I said I’d like to explore, photograph, and write about more of the particular new developments in my region, and just show them to you and along with my thoughts and ask what you think of them.
One reason for that is that I don’t know whether there’s anything distinctive about anything getting built today here or there, and I’m curious how folks all over the country like it. Another is making the effort to see these generic pieces of the landscape as specific places. I think that’s valuable.
For today’s piece, I’m looking at one such development—not new, but recent, as these things go—which I’ve driven by a million times. I pulled in there, once, to get sushi at the Japanese restaurant in the center (it was not good). It’s a mixed-use development, with a large parking lot and garage.
If you’re just looking at the supermarket that anchors it, a Harris Teeter, and its parking lot, it looks like any old strip plaza:
But the architecture is imitative of old small-town architecture, and there is even some real second-floor space for offices. I’m up above the supermarket here, via a staircase off to the side of the entrance!
Here’s what the rest of the structures look like:
I like it.
Here’s the whole thing. I was surprised how small it is when I saw it on Google Maps, honestly. You can pack a lot more in a small space with mixed uses, multiple stories, and individual buildings or the appearance of them. (The “breaking up the facade” thing is done much, much better here, where it looks like a series of connected but distinct structures, versus those giant block-long buildings with multicolored panels and little bits jutting out here and there.)
I was also surprised how small the parking lot actually is. (Although there is underground parking, which is very expensive and pretty much leaves this sort of thing to large developers only.) One of the striking things about shopping centers is how utterly the structure itself is often dwarfed in terms of lot coverage compared to the surface parking. There may be less parking relative to retail here, too, but at least the garage conceals some of that and allows for a development that can be experienced in a more compact way.
If I pull out the view, you can see this was likely built in anticipation of the nearby Metrorail station, as were lots of other developments nearby, which almost come together and feel like a little urban area. If you wanted to walk along some wide roads, you could walk to the Metro from here.
Once the remaining unbuilt lots fill in here, pretty much all with some kind of multifamily housing and maybe, hopefully, a little bit of other uses, you’ll have something that really approximates a low-intensity small-town or city neighborhood, pretty far out in Fairfax County suburbia. One of the keys to a nice town or neighborhood is that every distinct development or building isn’t amazing. It all just comes together and works.
But back to the development itself. All of its little design details do for me what an old town or city does: it has this feeling of spatial and, following that, psychological three-dimensionality. You aren’t just walking along the sidewalk in front of the stores. You can go up, you can pick a direction at a little intersection, at certain points you’re at the back of certain buildings, etc. Not important things when you’re running errands, but just a little bit more stimulating and interesting.
I go back and forth of how much it matters if this kind of quasi-urbanism is “real” or not. Does it really matter if it evolved or if it was created? If we iterated our way to a final state or just built it all at once? In theory I think there is something valuable about that old process. But I also say that people need to live somewhere, and that you have to compare stuff like this to housing subdivisions, not to real towns.
You can play architecture critic or you can wonder what the fate of these large-developer projects will be in a couple of generations. But if we got the point where the floor in development quality was “it looks like they tried to imitate a Main Street” and not strip malls and subdivisions separated by six lanes of traffic, wouldn’t that be really big?
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It's interesting that this feels very much like a prefab version of Shirlington, which of course is ... mostly a former parking lot and (older) car-centered department/retail store area. One of the things this appears to be missing is one of the elements the Shirlington plan incorporates, which is a balance between retail, daytime office work, and residential that guarantees a better spreading of demand for things like restaurants and shops through the days. But I agree that this sort of thing really looks and likely feels better. One of the problems with doing something like this in an urban or core suburban setting is just finding the sheer amount of land (even for a "small" development like this)--redevelopment of existing spaces, like malls, would probably be the best way to make it happen.
Suburban Square in Ardmore, Penn. is very similar to this. There's even an 8 story office building done up with an NYC kind of facade and a gym on the ground floor. There are grassy areas, wide sidewalks, and every time we're there (our favorite Taiwanese restaurant is in there) I think about how far the developers went to recreate what people clearly want: a walkable downtown.