Years ago in McAllen, Texas, an old abandoned 124,500-square-foot Walmart superstore was renovated and put to new use as the largest single-floor public library in the United States. Across America, many malls have emptied out and thousands of abandoned big box stores sit empty, including hundreds of former Walmarts. Some, though, are getting creative new leases on life, becoming community markets, indoor tracks, gaming spaces, museums and more.

In McAllen, aisles that used to divide shoppers have been adapted or replaced to serve the community. The old Walmart is packed with computer labs, public meeting spaces, a cafe, an art gallery, a used bookstore and more. In other small towns and suburbs around the United States, the generic promise of all-in-one convenience big box stores once offered is being realized in new and site-specific ways.

Designers at the research and development lab of KTGY Architecture + Planning in Los Angeles have particularly inspiring aspirations for old shopping centers: plug-and-play modular prefabs that subdivide big empty boxes into transitional housing for the homeless. This is not the first time architects and designers have attempted creative solutions to this pervasive problem, but it’s notably ambitious.

The firm’s Re-Habit project involves housing as well as support spaces and services fit into unused spaces in big boxes or individual shopping outlet stores like Sears and JCPenney. Self-supporting communal residences, where occupants rotate chores like working in the kitchen or keeping the dining hall clean, are coupled with facilities to providing training and potentially even employment.

Where some might see empty space, others see opportunity. The large, flat roofs of big box stores, for example, are ideal for rooftop gardening, open-air recreation and solar panels — these kinds of uses would pair well with a project like Re-Habit. Many big boxes have outdoor plaza areas (not to mention giant parking lots) that could accommodate small pop-up shops and food carts, too.

Adaptive reuse in the realm of big retail is forward-thinking but also proven concept. Big boxes have been turned into commercial gyms, corporate offices, schools, churches and (yes, this is true) even a SPAM Museum. Whatever the project, it takes vision and resources to turn such dauntingly huge structures around as well as an understanding of the potential pitfalls and unique opportunities of this peculiar building typology.

Such large-scale conversions tend to work best when they take advantage of big box assets and work within their limitations. Generally, big box stores reside in huge buildings that are located in prime spots, often along highways, which makes them accessible but can also make them hard to fill up. They generally have a lot in common, like orientations that lend themselves to being sectioned into bays and limited natural light, features that can work well for things like libraries. Often, though, the best option is simply whatever best fits community needs, which is often a mixed-use program that can more effectively fill out a bigger interior.

Big retailers may be more prevalent in suburbs, but there are some prime urban examples as well. A series of converted Sears plants in major US cities offer a range of realized visions for what big old commercial buildings can become. In Minneapolis, for instance, a massive mail-order Sears plant and retail store was abandoned by its makers for years before being turned into the Midtown Exchange, a busy structure full of restaurants, stores, offices, condos and apartments. It took a lot of players to make this work, including invested city officials and both public and private funding from various sources.

Often, these conversions speak to the character of the cities in which they are located. In Seattle, a place known for its coffee, the city’s old Sears plant now houses the Starbucks headquarters. In Los Angeles, land of Hollywood, a deserted Sears was used for film shoots during its derelict years but is on its way to becoming a residential and commercial hub. Boston and Memphis have converted Sears projects, too — uses are mixed in both cases.

While the individual projects vary, each city has something in common having turned a similarly monumental structure into something new. These various projects fill in gaps and address needs that are fundamentally local. Together, they represent a series of blueprints that other cities can look to, whether they have Sears plants themselves or are simply looking for ways to deal with big old commercial spaces.

Existing examples can provide paths forward, but other architects have grander visions, too, some of which have yet to be tried. Designers could, for instance, build around big boxes on all sides, then turn the central old structures into community hubs or parking lots or productive green spaces. Another option is to tear down sections of roofs and facades, dividing big boxes up into smaller and more manageable units while leaving structural supports intact.

There is no one-size-fits-all solution for disused spaces, but cities, towns and sururbs looking for inspiration have both real-world examples and conceptual designs to draw on. In some sense, the core recipe never changes — for any big transformation project, municipal officials, citizens, developers and designers will always have to come together to find best-fit solutions on a case-by-case basis.

For much of history, urban planning as we know it didn’t exist. Sure, there were cities with zoning ordinances and building codes, but ones thoroughly planned from scratch with heavily controlled development are largely a recent phenomenon. So a few years ago, the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association (known as SPUR) assembled ten key illustrations to summarize the twists and turns planners took to get where we are today.

Illustrations like this one of the Garden City from the early 1900s are powerful things, able to distill complex ideas down into compelling graphics. The idea in this case was to create greenbelts for urban dwellers and keep urban centers limited to populations of just over 30,000 people. Along similar lines, Le Corbusier’s “Towers in the Park” vision incorporated vast open spaces, but instead of spreading out, it pushed up, proposing people live in towers. This idea heavily shaped urban design in America, and public housing projects in particular.

More known for his architecture than his urban planning ideas, Frank Lloyd Wright had a lot of thoughts on how people should live and work outside of the actual houses and offices he built. His ideas for things like Broadacre City were more rural than urban, taking large plots of land and turning them into family housing in which each person would live on an acre of land. If implemented, this idea would have turned the entire country effectively into a giant mega-suburb.

The street grid was not a modern invention as such, but it was deployed much more rigorously and often starting from scratch in American cities like Philadelphia that were essentially working from a blank slate. In many cities, grids were laid out regardless of complex topography, creating problems down the road. Linked together, some of America’s gridded cities have started to become something bigger — megaregions, alluded to by science fiction authors like William Gibson decades ago and increasingly a reality today.

On a more closeup scale, transects have been used to show spectrums of possibility for urban planners ranging, for example, from highly paved urban spaces to lush green areas, rendering visible different hybrid typologies in between. As cities grew up, they also employed setback principles to guide growth and maintain light access, which fundamentally shaped the skylines and on-the-ground experiences of major metropolitan areas.

A classic in any list of historical city maps, the Nolli Map drawn in the 18th century was incredibly ambitious for its time, detailing every last little aspect of Rome and providing a basis for comparing old and new forms of this famous city. Notably, it is a straight-on view — maps of its time often tilted things at angles, which distorted the geography, but this one became a precursor for what we think of as typical plan-type maps today.

At the other end of the spectrum are the psychogeographical maps developed by Situationists in the mid-1900s, which aimed not to depict the shapes of buildings and spaces in between but to instead document the subject experience of the city. It was in many ways a reaction against a Nolli-type approach as well as the rigorously rectilinear plans of people like Le Corbusier. Maps were drawn from memory and then used to understand the “psychogeography” of cities.

Finally, the most unusual selection of all: the so-called “hockey stick” chart. This captures an aspect of the history of cities, specifically: the effects of the industrial revolution on global temperatures. It’s a diagram not so much about how to physically build a city but the big-picture impacts to think about while designing one.

Perpetually divisive, Brutalist landmarks around the world are disappearing fast. A massive 716-page book called “SOS Brutalism – Save the Concrete Monsters!” aims to archive as many of them as possible – and hopefully, inspire public passion to save them before they’re demolished.

Two projects featured in the book were destroyed during the publishing process – London’s Robin Hood Gardens, designed by Alison and Peter Smithson, and New Delhi’s Pragati Maidan, designed by Rewal and Mahendra Raj, both completed in 1972. Since the book came out in November 2017, there have likely been additional losses.

Often described as ugly, cold, imposing and out of scale with human life, these buildings are increasingly considered eyesores, but proponents argue that they’re historically significant and should be preserved. Whatever our personal feelings about their aesthetics may be, they stand as stark representations of the time in which they were built. Many of them represented independence and cultural progress to their communities at the time. Contrary to popular perception, a large number of these structures and other concrete monuments of the era were designed and built as local efforts, not by authoritarian governments.

The book, which comes in both German and English editions, is a global survey of Brutalist architecture from the 1950s to 1970s.

“Some 100 contributors document 120 key buildings from this period, including many previously unpublished discoveries that are in acute danger of loss through neglect of intended demolition. Moreover, the book features overviews of Brutalism in architecture in twelve regions around the world. Case studies of hotspots such as the Macedonian capital Skopje or New Haven, Connecticut, and essays on the history and theory of Brutalism round out this lavishly illustrated book. The supplement collects papers of an international symposium on Brutalism in architecture held in Berlin in 2012.”

The book is part of the larger #SOSBRUTALISM project, a growing database that contains over 1,800 Brutalist buildings.

“The buildings in the database marked red are in particular jeopardy. This is an unprecedented initiative: #SOSBrutalism is open to everyone who wants to join the campaign to save Brutalist buildings! It is a powerful tool that allows fans of Brutalism to communicate with one another across Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr etc.”

Anyone can contribute images, information or texts to the website or use the hashtag #SOSBrutalism to highlight a building that might be in danger. The site also encourages the public to join in on current rescue campaigns, and you can browse galleries, maps and timelines of Brutalist architecture around the world.

A series of disused railway arches in London have become surprisingly cozy interior spaces with the addition of modular wooden systems that fit together like puzzles. Architecture firm Boano Prišmontas has developed a kit of parts that can be quickly and easily deployed in a variety of similar spaces, working with developers and local governments to make those spaces valuable to the community once more.

“The Arches Project” uses dry-joint techniques to infill abandoned “pocket spaces” around the UK, including undercrofts and multi-story car parks as well as the arches beneath railroad lines. The firm says its value lies in its “nomadic, temporary and sustainable approach.” The company that owns the railroad already rents out these spaces to pop-up shops and other businesses, but provides nothing but some neon lights and corrugated plastic lining, which doesn’t improve the thermal quality of the space, and only allows certified installers to fix the lining onto the listed brick vaults.

“Boano Prišmontas worked around this constraint to design a freestanding self-buildable plug-in space, a room-within-a-room that is built by expanding its shape as much as possible to infill the vault of an arch.

The digitally fabricated structural system is comprised of two elements:

1. The boxes. Modular CNC-cut plywood units that are repeated to infill the space as much as possible and stacked on walls to support the beams as well as the external polycarbonate cladding.

2. The beams. Modular CNC-cut plywood pieces joined together to cover a maximum span of 7.2m. They are the support onto which the insulation sheet is clipped on.

The boxes are sized to host the polycarbonate facade, which allows to fill the internal space with natural light. The polycarbonate panels also spill light on the street showing a glimpse of the activity taking place inside the space.”

Made entirely of certified birch plywood sheets, the puzzle pieces are CNC cut to minimize material wastage and ensure a perfect fit. Every component, including the facade cladding and insulation sheet, is made to be re-deployed when dismantled (a basic tenet of the Designed for Disassembly movement.)

“The railway arches are a unique urban asset as they host all sorts of retail activities and productive spaces such as studios, laboratories, workshops, mechanics, shops, micro breweries, and coworking spaces to name just a few. Railway arches are the backbone of the ‘productive London’. The Arches Project aims to preserve and promote the diversity of uses by quickly creating a spacious, warm and dry space that delivers affordable workspace for local businesses.”

Overall, this is a pretty cool example of making better use of available urban space in a way that produces very little waste. Ideally, there would also be some serious consideration given to how the project impacts its surrounding community, including whether poor and unhoused people are able to take part in it and whether the installations promote gentrification, potentially having a negative future impact on affordability in the area. Projects that don’t consider social impacts simply aren’t sustainable.

Today, as millions of people around the world gather to participate in the youth-led Global Climate Strike, architecture firms are talking about how they can help. According to the grassroots outreach initiative Architects Advocate for Action on Climate Change, more than 330 firms and individuals in architecture and design plan to participate in their local strikes.

Given that buildings account for almost 40 percent of total energy consumption in the United States, architects and designers can make a big impact in global efforts to cut carbon emissions. In fact, members of the American design and construction industry have a responsibility to contribute to the transition from fossil fuels to “a thriving zero-carbon economy,” says the group.

On Friday, millions of people around the world will walk out of workplaces & homes to join young people as they demand an end to the age of fossil fuels & climate justice for all. We proudly support our teams from around the world as they take to the streets.#ClimateStrike pic.twitter.com/ROV3TO6TCf

— Grimshaw Architects (@GrimshawArch) September 19, 2019

Our office is out! #schoolstrike4climate #ClimateStrike #GlobalClimateStrike #FridaysForFuture pic.twitter.com/bVp8Ju3Xqb

— David Morley Arch (@DavidMorleyArch) September 20, 2019

Young people from more than 150 countries are skipping school today as part of a series of protests led by Swedish youth activist Greta Thunberg, with the aim of urging world leaders to take aggressive action against climate catastrophe. Among the largest of the protests is expected to take place in New York City, where strikers will be joined by members of American Institute of Architects New York Committee on the Environment.

In the UK, firms like Stanton Williams, Grimshaw and dRMM have joined the strikes, but they’re pledging to do more than just march. Some have promised to do internal reviews of their companies’ carbon footprints, while others will be taking part in industry discussions that can identify measurable changes architects and designers can make.

“At Architects Advocate, we believe the demands of the striking youth are not only reasonable, but that they resonate with our professional interests and commitments,” says Tom Jacobs, co-founder of Architects Advocate for Action on Climate Change. “That’s why we launched the #StandWithGreta campaign in support of their movement. In Chicago, we’ll be meeting at 11:30am at Federal Plaza on September 20 to participate. Other cities around the country will organize to do the same.”

“Architects please join us in standing up for the next generation by supporting the true leaders of our time. Learn more and sign a pledge to #StandWithGreta at architects-advocate.com.”