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| Building a Retail Experience: Lessons from a 2,000 Year-Old Marketplace by Richard Seireeni, Brand Architect January 27, 2009 |
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We've heard much about the importance of creating brand experiences, especially as it relates to shopping destinations. 'Experience' is the buzzword that describes that extra something that causes someone to chose one destination over another, other things being equal. Shopping center developers and their tenants who face shrinking sales realize their customers have cheaper and more efficient ways to purchase goods, like the Internet or the local Wal-Mart, so they've begun experimenting with 'experience' as a draw factor.
Learning from Campo dei Fiori Shoeless, hungry and armed with Italian 101, I bravely knocked on the door of Signora Rossellini's apartment. "Mi scusi. Dove sono le mie scarpe?" With a look of shock, Signora Rossellini emotionally explained that there were no shoes placed outside my door. She would have noticed, as she carefully collected shoes every night. Then she glanced at my feet, and feeling sorry for me, lent me a pair of her oversized pink house slippers. That's how I left the building to wander through the Campo's open-air market looking for a pair of cheap sneakers.
Over the next nine months, I spent virtually every day studying the history, the architecture, the traffic and the uses of this amazing urban space. Campo dei Fiori became the subject of my thesis, and what I learned has relevance for developers, community officials and retailers interested in capturing a vibrant experience in a shopping environment.
The Components of Experience.
1. Scale
2. Texture
3. Circulation and Access 4. Mixed Use
5. Change
6. Display
7. History
8. People
Influencing Modern Shopping Center Design. In some respects it's sad that we even have to discuss this. All of the qualities explained here exist or have existed in our cities and towns. It's only been over the last fifty years with the advent of suburbs, freeways and mass distribution that the monotone mall has replaced Main Street and the town square. While these malls have been wonders of efficiency, they lack heart. That's why they get torn down when a new, bigger mall opens down the road. It's also why we feel hustled. We are aware that the retailers want us to purchase quickly to keep their return per square foot high. And because these malls are driven by profit, the management companies' primary concern has been the creation of an optimized tenant mix with little overlap. Missing is the bare knuckles competition one sees on the street. Also missing are things that do not directly contribute to mall profit, like musicians and palm readers for instance. So now that there are new and more efficient ways to buy things, developers and shopping center operators have been forced to pay attention to the qualities of a positive experience that have existed all along in public spaces, that have existed quite successfully for over 2,000 years at Campo dei Fiori. Principal photography: John Colao. Additional photography: Rick Seireeni. Updated from an essay written in 2004. © Rick Seireeni, Brand Architect and President The Brand Architect Group is a strategic brand consultancy with offices in Los Angeles, Tokyo and Shanghai. Project specialties include retail, food service, banking and real estate development.
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Articles by Richard Seireeni: |
One of the more popular
solutions is the 'Main Street'
model, where the designs
echo romanticized town
squares. A recent example is
The Grove in Los Angeles, a
project that captures a small
town feel with a Disneyesque
execution. While efforts like
tthese are a step in the right
direction away from herme-
tically sealed malls, some of
these 'Main Streets' still have an artificial, sterile feel. Because most are designed and built all at once, they lack the sense of history that a naturally evolving community center has. Because the spaces tend to be 'secure', we don't see a lot of street people, itinerant craftsmen or freelance musicians. Because the developer 'edits' the experience, the result can be one-dimensional. The unbridled penchant to be 'messy' humans is gone. In the worst cases, it produces a prophylactic environment that fails to give us that full hit of the 'human experience' we crave as social animals. So how should property owners, developers and communities create viable and sustainable retail experiences? 
To start, I think it's important
to look at real thing - the real
Main Streets that large
property owners seek to
emulate. The Santa Monica
Third Street Promenade and
Seattle's Pike Place Market
are two that come to mind.
Both evolved naturally with
their diversity having been
preserved by a coalition of
property owners and local
government. The older buildings clash with the new in a pleasing jumble that gives us a sense of history. Cars, delivery vehicles, trash and smells that are a normal part of the urban commercial experience are not edited out of the picture. The mix of small shops, stands, street vendors and the nearby department stores all lend to a wonderful mish-mash of personal and corporate expression. And most importantly, there is no gatekeeper allowing certain people in and keeping certain people out. So long as the laws of civility are obeyed, all are welcome, and they all come. The suburban family in their Cadillac Escalade rubs shoulders with the homeless guy who just emerged from his appliance box home. Sure, there's the occasional fly in the soup, but the experience is rich and exciting. I like a little theater with my commerce, a preference I developed while studying a 2,000 year-old marketplace in Rome.
I arrived in Rome on a bright spring morning
in 1973. It was the beginning of my Rome
Studies Program sponsored by the
University of Washington School of
Architecture. And while I had lived in
Europe before, it was a big change for a
person raised in the suburbs of Seattle, like
me. So it was a further surprise to be
quartered in a wonderful little apartment
overlooking one of the most vibrant and
exciting urban spaces in the world. This
space is the piazza Campo dei Fiori, an
urban stage that traces its heritage back
to the time of Republican Rome. One of
the many nuggets of information* is that
this is the site of Julius Caesar's murder in 44 BCE. He was knifed in a small building adjoining the Theater of Pompey, an imposing structure that first established this area in the urban framework of Rome. That first day was a full one for me. Connecting with my fellow students and my Professoressa. Exploring the neighborhood. Getting a tour of my building and learning the house rules, one of which was to leave your shoes outside the front door at least once a week. This was so the old woman who lived on the ground floor could clean them, giving her a sense of usefulness and a little pocket money. As my only pair of college kid shoes were a little banged up, I left them outside the door on my first night. In the morning they were gone.
The dazzling scene, crowded
with early morning shoppers
and stands selling everything
imaginable, had appeared
literally overnight in what had
been a relatively empty square.
The smells, the shouts, the
color all combined to make a
tapestry of human life that
instantly knit me in and
welcomed me as a resident.
I explored everynook and
cranny, making a big circle through the piazza and returning where I had started near the gypsy stands that sat in the least desirable part of the market behind the fish stalls. Still wearing the slippers, I noticed a cart with used shoes. There were my shoes neatly tied together with a 200 lire tag attached. 200 lire poorer, I headed upstairs to eat my breakfast of fresh eggs, prosciutto and bread on the terrace overlooking the thieves, the beggars, the merchants and the residents of the oldest, continuously populated area of Rome.
Humans, like other animals, have
an inherent sense of comfortable
scale. Too small and we feel
cramped or even trapped. Too
large and we feel exposed and
vulnerable. Too uniform and we
feel a lack of stimulation. Too
complex or spread out and we
feel a lack place. These feelings
cannot be translated into specific widths and heights, as this is a sliding scale. Nevertheless, lay people as well as architects know when a space works. Campo dei Fiori works because the shape is like a shoebox. For people, this is a pleasing shape because we can detect the boundaries. The height gives a sense of enclosure without being oppressive. At Campo dei Fiori, the buildings are mostly five stories, which allow us to easily see people and details on the upper levels. The open sky is large enough to give us a real vista, like walking out of a dense forest into a large open glen. There are also many openings onto adjacent streets and courtyards that give our eye some complexity and our imagination some intrigue. We can see similar examples of effective scale at Union Square in Manhattan and at The Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica. Most malls, even those with multi-story atriums, fail when it comes to effective scale. This suggests why many of us feel uneasy in large enclosed shopping centers. The scale does not trigger the right comfort cues in our brain.
Closely related to scale is texture, and I'm
not talking about mixing a little ochre stucco
with some fake brick. At Campo dei Fiori,
there are the cobbled streets, the richly
hued facades, overhanging balconies, a
marble fountain and an ominous statue of
Giordano Bruno that serves both as land-
mark and meeting place. There are also the
inscribed stone plaques, uniquely orna-
mented fenestration, awnings of different
designs, signs that didn't spring from an
identity manual, complex masonry patterns and the wear marks that suggest we are not the only ones who have been here. The smells, the graffiti and even the trash add to the texture and a positive overall feeling. In this texture we feel the presence of our fellow citizens - living and dead. That sense, that many people made their personal history here, is totally missing in most commercial shopping centers. Contemporary malls do not reveal the hand of our fellow man. Failure to provide the texture that communicates human expression, with all its quirks and illogic, eliminates one eighth of the formula for producing a rewarding experience.
Movement is at the root of our ancient
brain. For defensive reasons, we are always
on the lookout for it. If movement in public
spaces lacks complexity, we soon grow
bored. That's why the movement of people
and vehicles are so important to Campo
dei Fiori. Pedestrians, scooters, carts and
motorized delivery vehicles compete with
cars and taxis on the racetrack-like ring
road that circles the piazza. Entry points
are at each corner and at third points down the length. The tempo and composition of this traffic changes throughout the day. In these ebbs and flows is a complex circulation that would appear as an oval dissected by paths and punctuated by rest points. Round and round, zipping in and out, with a pause.
It's as though the traffic was choreographed by a composer. This musical circulation is also critical to the sense of experience. One way to create good circulation is to open retail areas to a variety of traffic including those on foot and those in vehicles. Property owners may control traffic pattern, but it should not
be limited to a single type of traffic. In fact, efforts should be made to create
clear and accessible thoroughfares that punch through privately held spaces where possible.
Spaces must have many
users in order to produce a
rich experience. At Campo
dei Fiori we have use by
many groups for different
purposes. Mixed use tran-
slates into hotels, offices and
private residences sitting
side-by-side on the upper
floors. It means a school on
the corner andrestaurants
cheek by jowl with shops. It means beggars, street musicians and hawkers of sports souvenirs competing with the grocer, the tailor and the candlestick maker. Mixed use means a political rally, a religious observance, parades, commerce, dining, play and the afternoon passeggiatta. It also says it's OK to just come here and watch the human parade. The minute we try to edit these uses, we sterilize the experience. We are the poorer for it.
Even the best experience must change
over time. It may be over the day, over the
week or from season to season. At Campo
dei Fiori, activities change constantly. Some
are regular and predictable. Others are
spontaneous. For instance, the open-air
market is a morning affair just five hours
long, after which the place is transformed
into a complex of sidewalk restaurants and
cafes serving lunch. In the later afternoon,
it becomes a promenade with shop owners
taking front stage. This is about the same time that school lets out and the center of the piazza fills with children kicking soccer balls and playing tag. Later, the restaurants reappear with a more elegant presentation including tableside serenades. The movie theater opens, and the wine bars fill. As the adults begin to retreat, teens take over, branding the place with their ever-changing definition of what's cool. And in the darkest hours of the night, the whores, the homeless and the workers who set up the next morning's market take over the grave shift. The rhythm of the space is like acts in a play. It produces an experience with a rich cast of characters and dozens of set changes.
How can you make history in a brand new
development? The answer is that history
happened and history will happen. We
build on the foundation of what was
supplied, and we add to it over time.
Campo dei Fiori is, quite frankly, not what
it was thirty years ago when I was in
college. The market is half the size, the
wonderful sail awnings have been replaced
by more standard umbrellas, and the
merchant mix has become slicker reflecting
the wealthier classes that have moved into this previously poor neighborhood. But this is part of the history that began with merchants hawking things to theatergoers 2,000 years ago. Each decade brought new history, and each decade in the future will add more. This is why developers and civic authorities should ground their projects in things that are indigenous to the area and its people. Great care should be taken to avoid trendy or purely decorative solutions that produce a Disneyland. Developers should also allow for change and the addition of new ideas by not locking their developments into rigid themes or guidelines. The result will be a more sustainable experience that doesn't lose its luster over time and is more difficult for competing centers to knock off.
People are the most important ingredient
by far. As social beings, we are drawn to
crowds. In our modern, more isolated lives,
we tend to move from private residence,
via sealed capsule, to work where we run
into the same people every day. When we
step out into the public, at a ball game, or
at a shopping center, or at an airport, we
come into contact with hundreds of
strangers. These are people we cannot
edit or control. And this is what makes it
interesting. We check out the folks around us. The more diverse this crowd, the richer the experience. At Campo dei Fiori, the crowds come from every walk of life. There are residents and tourists, merchants and thieves, musicians and lotto salesmen, the gentrified elite and the working class Communist, the very, very young and the very, very old, the educated and the illiterate. The sea of Roman humanity passes through this piazza everyday, and every class is represented. No one stands at the entrance and selects who should enter. The tenant mix is broad enough and the right-of-way is free enough to produce a good social mixer. In truth, the daily outdoor market helps a great deal. Outdoor markets are great levelers for society. Therefore, the attempts to rebuild or manufacture 'main streets' in this country should seriously look at involving local farmers in the tenant mix. For other shopping centers, the key is to encourage everyone to come. Even the gypsies who stole my shoes added to my experience at Campo dei Fiori.