Aberdeen Centre
Richmond
Bing Thom Architects
Bing Thom Architects designs a mixed-use complex that is helping a suburb become more of an urban kind of place.
By Trevor Boddy
Bing Thom’s Aberdeen Centre for Vancouver’s heavily Asian suburb of Richmond is the first of the new, globalized shopping malls to be built on this continent. It is a truly 21st-century reinvigoration of the type, with a layout that ignores the tired bipolar model that places the supermarket at one end, the anchor department store at the other, and double-loaded rows of shops in-between. With its smartly detailed, colored-glass walls, the sinuous Aberdeen Centre breaks all the conventions of shopping-mall design: It has an innovative layout, an unconventional leasing strategy, shopping floors that are vertically stacked with multilevel parking to one side, a 120-unit condo tower right over the mall, and a net-to-gross ratio that’s low due to all the space devoted to public amenities. The design may also point to something many cities talk about these days, but few have accomplished: the urbanization and densification of postwar suburbs.
Aberdeen represents the vision of its owner, Hong Kong–born media entrepreneur Thomas Fung. Built in the early 1980s, the original Fung-owned Aberdeen Mall was underperforming economically two decades later and had become difficult to manage (its movie theater and arcade attracted local gangs). To revive the property, Fung engaged a fellow Hong Konger-gone-Canadian, Bing Thom, who had emerged from the shadow of his former employer, Arthur Erickson, to become Vancouver’s most progressive city builder. Seeking a wider customer base for the mall, Fung took Thom’s radical advice to demolish the existing shopping center and build a new, 562,000-square-foot retail-residential-entertainment complex on its site, renamed Aberdeen Centre in English. Aberdeen refers to Richmond’s equivalent in Hong Kong—an upscale suburb. But the mall’s more important and all-new Chinese name doesn’t refer to location at all; its ideograms translate as “Timely” and “Trendy Place.”
As the project moved through design and construction, Fung rethought the mall’s retail mix. He renewed none of his former retail tenants, instead lining up leading-edge Asian retailers, such as Thailand’s answer to IKEA and one of Korea’s leading clothing stores. Then he secured the North American master franchise for Daiso, the Japanese equivalent of Wal-Mart.
Thom’s curvilinear design responds to siting considerations, such as a realigned public street on the east side of the property that traces a large arc accommodating the mall’s enlarged footprint. With a new rail line set to open for Vancouver’s 2010 Winter Olympic Games and a transit station planned just north of the site, Thom placed condominium apartments closest to the rail connection. While cars pull into a garage on the west side of the complex, pedestrians can enter from the north, east, and southeast.
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Formal name of project:
Aberdeen Centre
Location:
Richmond
Gross square footage:
Retail 400,000 sq ft
Parking 300,000 sq ft
Total construction cost:
$62 million
Owner:
Fairchild Developments Ltd.
Architect:
Bing Thom Architects
1430 Burrard Street
Vancouver, BC V6Z 2H2
Tel 604 682 1881
Fax 604 688 1343
www.bingthomarchitects.com
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