Landscape Architecture: Landscape Architecture: - School of ...

Cooper Carry, Mizner Park, Boca Raton, Florida, 1991
With the support of the Boca Raton City Council, Cooper Carry converted Florida’s Boca Raton Mall, a failing dumbbell
mall from the 1950s, into the elegant Mizner Park. The council banned all other new commercial development
downtown. One of the original department stores was retained and remodelled as an art gallery and cultural centre,
while the 183-metre (600-foot) armature of the original mall and other department stores were demolished to make
way for a new, landscaped town square. This palm-lined square gave the city a new civic image, creating a mixed-use
residential, commercial and cultural complex, a hybrid development that succeeded despite the reconditioning of the
nearby Town Center Mall (1979) that had initiated the earlier mall’s decline.
garbage to fill the wetlands. Opposition groups have since
produced beautiful plans to uncover the Los Angeles River
with restored wetlands and new public parks, plans that have
ultimately led the City of Los Angeles Planning Department to
propose ‘greening’ the entire LA River basin in 2006 with Mia
Lehrer as landscape consultant. 5
As foreseen by Disney at EPCOT, such spectacular,
landscaped corporate enclaves have become the global
standard of development. The story of the associated
commercial subcentres is well known. Designers shifted from
single-armature open-air malls to interior, multilevel, airconditioned
extravaganzas, ending in huge megamalls with
four or more armatures. More than 40 million people
annually visit the artificial, interior, phantasmagorical,
undulating landscape of the Camp Snoopy theme park at the
centre of the Mall of America (Jerde Associates, 1992).
Developers have also transformed some older dumbbell malls
into landscaped urban spectacles. Florida’s Boca Raton Mall
from the 1950s became the elegant, palm-lined Mizner Park, a
landscaped town square surrounded by housing above stores
and an art museum (Cooper Carry, 1991). Designers
reconditioned even small malls in wealthy suburbs with
sidewalks, streets, trees, plantings, cafés and cinemas, as in
Florida’s Winter Park Village (Dover, Kohl and Partners, 1997).
The 2002 Los Angeles Forum for Architecture & Urban Design
‘Dead Malls’ competition produced even more imaginative
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