Last Mile Mall
Year: 2020
Location: Kunming, China
Competition Entry: Underground Passageway Renewal
Team: Conor O’Shea
Last Mile Mall combines the last-mile delivery warehouse and the shopping mall to produce new forms of social interaction.
The way society consumes goods and interacts socially is in the midst of a widespread transformation. Shopping increasingly occurs online, as does social interaction. Virtual behaviors, however, have reciprocal physical impacts on the landscape. Goods distributed from fragmented supply chains aggregate at warehouses before finally making their way to last-mile delivery centers. This process has had multiple effects, including the demise of the golden era of the shopping mall, as well as increasing isolation and loneliness for consumers.
Last Mile Mall envisions how we might reintegrate these essential activities, providing an alternative to the increasing disappearance of commercial and social life from the physical realm.
This radical new hybrid space invites consumers to participate in a social spectacle of picking up goods purchased online. In this space, a swirl of whirring robots, cardboard packaging, and meandering consumers delivers a spontaneous and unexpected contrast to the instant gratification of online shopping.
The space is tied together by a faceted wall filled with bioluminescent algae, which reminds visitors of their natural environment in two ways. First, it highlights ecological characters and processes, and second, it produces an image reminiscent of stars in our galaxy. These two environmental scales, the organism and the cosmos, sustain human life and form a backdrop to the 21st-century retail activities that have come to define our modern economy.