Regional shopping mall’s design banks on meshing indoors, outdoors

BROOMFIELD – It won’t in any way be a traditional mall.

That’s the hope.

The hope of the architects behind the design of FlatIron Crossing is that, for one, shoppers won’t be aware when they’ve gone from outdoor to indoor or back again. “They’ll flow,” says Bob Tindall of the spaces.

Tindall is one of the principals in Seattle-based Callison Architecture Inc., which designed the regional mall under construction at the 96th Street Interchange with U.S. 36. One of the most prevalent themes behind the mall’s design, Tindall says, is to integrate more outdoor space than typically associated with such a center.

Mall developer Westcor Partners, based in Phoenix, wanted to push the envelope of shopping mall design on FlatIron Crossing, Tindall says. “Their first directive to us was ‘Something very unique and different,'” he says. “We spent a lot of time exploring what that could be.”

David Scholl, Westcor senior vice president, says one of the most attractive features of the mall is the merging indoor and outdoor aspects of the site plan.

“We’re trying to blur the lines of where outdoor and indoors start and stop,” Scholl says of the design. What Tindall calls “window walls,” for example, will roll up out of the way to let in the outdoors. Instead of blank walls, clear glass will be used throughout the mall.

Open air will be a design element; streams of sunlight, feature fare.

What Callison architects hope, Tindall says, is the design will bring the changing outdoor climate inside, supplying a different experience on different days.

What Callison architects know, Tindall says, is what people don’t want. They don’t want a fortress closed off to the outside world. Especially in Colorado shoppers don’t want another Westminster Mall, he says. “People’s expectations are much higher than that,” he says.

Richard Foy, one of the principals of Boulder-based Communication Arts Inc., which designed the enormously successful Park Meadows, says what people no longer want is the “plain vanilla box” shopping mall. “All malls are beginning to warm and fuzzy themselves up and trying to make gentle nods to their cultures and their marketplaces,” Foy says.

‘Integrated whole’

People also do not want “outparcels,” or one big mall surrounded by incongruous “power centers” or strip malls and boxes of chain restaurants. “What we’ve tried to do is take the whole parcel into an integrated whole,” Tindall says.

Park Meadows shopping mall is nice, but it is surrounded on its site by other developments that do not jibe with it. At FlatIron Crossing, the outdoors will be integrated into the project from the beginning, offering more continuity.

Better flow.

Time in the area

Callison, which has designed more than 60 Nordstrom outlets in its role as the department store chain’s architect, has specialties that include retail-based urban mixed-use developments and stores, shopping centers, theaters and entertainment facilities.

For the Broomfield mall, architects spent a lot of time in the area and used designers who had lived in Boulder. And, again, they studied what people like and what people don’t like – nationwide. They looked at “virtually every” new project in the country, Tindall says, from what had been well received to what had been “plunked down” without considering whether the culture of the area would embrace it.

Lines blur

Communities like what is specific to their region, he says of current retail trends. And because communities are clamoring for a sense of individual place to their commercial centers, for tenants to go into a center nowadays, they want to look at the customer bases and see that the centers recognize the unique attributes of the region.

The design of FlatIron Crossing, therefore, wouldn’t work anywhere else. It is “very organic” and “very dramatic,” Tindall says, but wouldn’t make sense in a city such as Seattle.

Foy says Park Meadows was the first mall that the company is aware of that successfully captured the culture of the region.

“So Park Meadows becomes the bellwether project that other projects are trying to emulate,” Foy says.

Office ‘raided’

Foy says one of the unique elements of FlatIron Crossing would be the attempt to reference Colorado’s great outdoors in an indoor mall, but that Communication Arts had drawn a similar scheme three years for a commercial project in Golden that was to be called Denver West. He says the architect that designed FlatIron Crossing “raided” the Communication Arts office and took four of its designers to Seattle. Then, “just coincidentally, those same ideas that were in Denver West appeared in FlatIron Crossing,” he says.

“So those are going to be unique things because Denver West was scrapped when FlatIron Crossing managed to secure the Nordstrom deal,” Foy says of the originality of the FlatIron Crossing design.

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