Galleria Dallas
Dallas
SMWM
SMWM and Omniplan renovate an aging diva of a mall, using contemporary materials and light-filled spaces to give her renewed life.
By David Dillon
The Dallas Galleria opened in 1982 at the conjunction of a tollway and an interstate, a textbook definition of a 100 percent location. For 20 years it was a money machine for developer Gerald Hines—an instant satellite city containing a hotel, office towers, movie theaters, and a glass-vaulted shopping mall with a skating rink, food court, jogging track, and other trendy amenities. It was more coherent and architecturally sophisticated than its Houston prototype, which Hines opened in 1970. (Both malls were inspired by the 19th-century Galleria in Milan, Italy.) It also happened to be the luxury mall closest to Dallas’s affluent northern suburbs.
But with the emergence of new retail concepts such as power centers and lifestyle centers, and major upgrades to competing malls, including the premiere NorthPark Center, the Galleria lost its cachet. Sales slumped, name retailers left, and the entire project suddenly looked passé. USB Realty eventually bought it from Hines, in 2002, and embarked on a $70 million renovation to get it back in the regional retail game.
“When we compared it to newer malls in Dallas, it looked so tired,” recalls Cathy Simon of SMWM, who collaborated with Hargreaves Associates and Omniplan of Dallas on the turnaround. Tired doesn’t begin to describe the situation. Circulation was poor, the mix of stores perplexing (boutiques and kids’ stores side by side), and there were no public spaces where shoppers could take a break from nonstop consumption.
The architects’ first big move was to convert the ground floor into an urban street by removing the ficus trees and planters, adding limestone paving and contemporary lighting, and creating small plazas with benches and sculpture at key points along the mall’s 960-foot-long spine. The effect was to turn a nondescript concourse into a chic shopping promenade featuring upscale retailers. Mid-price stores moved to the second level, and family stores to the third.
To improve vertical circulation, a tough issue in three-level malls, the architects added a sleek scissor escalator at center court, next to the ice rink, which they made smaller and more elliptical to improve flow around it. They made other key nodes more elliptical as well, and refaced balconies and walkways in green glass and Australian eucalyptus to create a richer and more fluid design.
Want the full story? Read the entire article in our February 2007 issue.
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Formal name of project:
Galleria Dallas
Location:
Dallas, Texas
Gross square footage:
250,000 sq. ft.
Owner:
UBS Asset Management
Total construction cost : $70 Million
Architect:
Moss Palmer
Director, Media + Public Relations
10 E. 33rd Street, 11th Floor 989 Market St, 3rd Floor
New York, NY 10016 San Francisco, CA 94103
T: 917.256.1600
T: 415.546.0400
mpalmer@smwm.com
www.smwm.com
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