Big Box Reuse

By Julia Christensen
Publisher: The MIT Press
Number Of Pages: 220
Publication Date: 2008-11-30
ISBN-10 / ASIN: 0262033798
ISBN-13 / EAN: 9780262033794

Book Description:
America is becoming a container landscape of big boxes connected
by highways. When a big box store upsizes to an even bigger box
"supercenter" down the road, it leaves behind more than the vacant
shell of a retail operation; it leaves behind a changed landscape
that can't be changed back. Acres of land have been paved around
it. Highway exits lead to it; local roads end at it. With
thousands of empty big box stores spread across America, these
sites have become a dominant feature of the American landscape.
In Big Box Reuse, Julia Christensen shows us how ten communities
have addressed this problem, turning vacated Wal-Marts and Kmarts
into something else: a church, a library, a school, a medical
center, a courthouse, a recreation center, a museum, and other
civic-minded structures. In each case, what was once a place to
shop has become a center of community life.
Christensen crisscrossed America identifying these projects, then
photographed, videotaped, and interviewed the people involved. The
first-person accounts and color photographs of Big Box Reuse reveal
the hidden stories behind the transformation of these facades into
gateways of community life. Whether a big box store becomes a
"Senior Resource Center" or a museum devoted to Spam (the kind that
comes in a can), each renovation displays a community's
resourcefulness and creativity—but it also raises questions about
how big box buildings affect the lives of communities. What does it
mean for us and for the future of America if the spaces of commerce
built by a few monolithic corporations become the sites where
education, medicine, religion, and culture are dispensed wholesale
to the populace?.

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