Giant Aisles of Insecurity

One of the aisles in Sam's Club

Have you ever been to one of these department stores where you feel like an insignificant being in the midst of tall shelves filled with products that you can purchase? If you step into Sam's Club, Lowe's, Reasor's, Target, The Home Depot or any such similar store, you'll know exactly what I am talking about. These are designed as large warehouses divided by countless number of aisles, each marked by the different products available. Some of these stores are almost like mazes and you can imagine the exhaustion parents face when their kids have fun playing hide-and-seek! Most times these stores are as high as a two-storeyed building and the shelves on either sides of an aisle are stacked with products ranging from furniture, to kitchen appliances, to garden tools, to pet food, to clothes, to grocery, to anything under the sky! I often wonder why these shelves are as high as they are... did the designer originally imagine customers climbing up as high as two floors to pull out something they wanted to buy? One would merely be able to see what's there at the top of the shelf, so forget about climbing!

Another puzzling characteristic of such aisles is the unpleasant eeriness and insecurity one can experience within an 'empty' aisle. By 'empty' I mean an aisle that is certainly occupied by the tall and filled shelves but devoid of a single customer or store-keeper. It is not just out of mere coincidence that I have had, more than one, unpleasant approaches from men in such circumstances. There have been several incidents starting from illicit begging for money to that of sexual assaults, such as this one where Cameron Aulner, a disabled employee in Walmart, tackled a suspected child molester within Walmart. In such situations these aisles are almost similar to a silent, empty, bad lit, public street where there is a high probability for one to be mugged! The presence of doors through which the victim as well as the perpetrator would have to exit the store and surveillance cameras watching all aisles, are two physical differences from a public street. Even though surveillance cameras provide evidence for investigations, they are insufficient to help, protect or react at the moment of crime. Hence, surveillance cameras and exit doors are not insurers of security.

As a victim of such unexpected events within a department store, I was introspective and considered being humbly dressed the next time I went into one. But then I realized that, maybe, it was not my personality or actions that welcomed such approaches from anybody. I realized that the space within the 'empty' aisles was conducive to such perpetrators; the absence of people in the immediate environment encouraged them to get into their act! Well, it may not be always possible to shove a huge crowd into all of these stores everyday! But it is always possible to rearrange the layout of the shelves so as to create an illusion of surveillance. Minor changes like reducing the heights of the shelves, arranging the aisles radially to face a central cash counter, maybe using a second floor altogether than just increasing the heights of shelves, etc would increase visibility between aisles and hence discourage anybody from getting into 'their act'!

I have to admit that the availability of almost everything in one department store is such a blessing. However, the number of such unfortunate incidents is increasing everyday and they happen not out of bad luck! Ensuring security within department stores is as challenging as ensuring the same outside.

Form Follows Function or Function Follows Form??

Louis Sullivan's
Wain Wright Building

"Form ever Follows Function" was a phrase coined by the architect Louis Sullivan in 1896 and Frank Lloyd Wright, his assistant, adopted and professed this phrase. It became one of the strong principles associated with architecture and industrial design that revolutionized architectural thinking in its modern age. This inspired many renowned architects like Le Corbusier and Mies Van De Rohe. Essentially this principle stated that the shape of a building or object should be primarily based upon its intended function or purpose.

Years after the era of Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright, the architectural education at many of the schools in India still propagate this school of thought. During my architectural education, the design process I was mentored into started with creating the layout of the room, or 'plan' as it is in technical terms, and then designing the form of the building. As much as it sounds boring, even the products of such design processes were excruciating versions of match-boxes or donuts! Some rational thinkers among my classmates would try the other way around... they would design the form of the building first and then squeeze it with the layout or the plan. Deconstructivists like Frank O Gehry, Rem Koolhaas and Daniel Libeskind have followed this principle, "Function Follows Form" to create their iconic buildings.

Seattle Central Library
by Rem Koolhaas

In real practice, such thinkers often come up with magnificent buildings that stand out in any skyline. But there have been issues concerning their buildings' functional efficiency even in terms of the building's capability to cope with the climate of the area. More often, utility is compromised for aesthetic appeal.

It takes more than just one fundamentalist approach to actually create a successful building that has an interesting and aesthetically pleasing form with an efficient and functional layout. Honestly, there is no one way out!

Unlike architectural design, when it comes to designing efficient cities or urban landscapes, there is only one single rule of magic! "Function follows form". This is where Urban Design differs from Architecture. Urban design deals with a multitude of layers including human and natural systems, economic and political organization, social networking, mobility of humans, goods and services through the ecological and urban web of a city. It deals with the formal and informal, organized and chaotic systems of order which necessitates a design process that allows the product to be receptive of and responsive to changes in time.

An abandoned building in
Youngstown, Ohio

I distinctly remember a lecture by Prof. Ian Bentley, where he said, "the uniqueness of a street is that its constructive elements (the buildings, its functions, roads, pavements, people, etc.) change according to their relative life spans; people in the buildings change quicker than the building's function; the function changes quicker than the building; the building changes form quicker than the pavement or the roads." Hence, if the roads or pavements are rigid, it doesn't allow buildings to change; if the buildings are rigid, it doesn't allow functions to change; so on and so forth. It is imperative for urban design to follow the principle of 'function follows form' because if the form is inefficient, any function will cease to exist over time. This is the natural process.

Now, you know why stores, buildings, apartments, homes and sometimes even entire communities become completely abandoned. It is simply because they were not built to be receptive or responsive to such changes! It is simply the failure of design!