Ahead of the film’s limited March 21 release, AD sat down with Townsend to reflect on the project nearly two decades later.
Architectural Digest: This project began when you decided to live inside the mall for just a week. When did the “week in the mall” become something bigger?
Michael Townsend: During our “week in the mall,” we found the space [that became the apartment], and that started the negotiations amongst us four artists; we couldn’t ignore this space, this opportunity. Prior to that, I had spent around two years of my life fighting to save historic mill buildings. That was a full-time passion. There were some 40-hour-week throw downs just dealing with city officials and developers, and during the course of all of that, I became entrenched in their ideology that said: “If you find a space that you deem to be underdeveloped, underserved, you have a responsibility to develop it.” From the city’s perspective, they wanted to develop those spaces because they were thinking the tax base wasn’t big over there, that they’re just filled with ramshackle artists and small businesses and a flea market. The developers viewed those buildings as things to be knocked down—they don’t look at the buildings, they look at the land, regardless of what structures are there. After spending years hearing those arguments over and over again, when we found that space in the mall, we thought, “You know what? I think we can roll with the consensus right now and develop this space.”
The original conversations about the idea of creating a home in the mall happened in 1999 and 2000, at the height of the tension of knowing that our home might get knocked down. I was still at Fort Thunder in that time fighting developers, and we could tell that the end was coming near. There was a conversation, flippantly, where we said, “If we lose a home, maybe we can gain a home.” The seed of the idea was planted then.
Do you still live in Providence?
I do. From my studio space, I can lean forward just the tiniest bit and I can see the mall through the window. It’s about a half mile away.
How did your relationship with the mall change over the course of those four years?
First of all, this mall defined the city very literally. I-95 is the main interstate that goes through our city. And if you drive on 95 and you look towards the city, it’s just mall—you can’t see the skyline anymore. Our beautiful state capital is not there, the mall is, architecturally, the wall you have to go through to experience Providence as a visual landscape.
So [if] this mall defined the city, then we were going to let the mall also define us. That’s a long way of saying that we started on the path of ritualistically moving towards letting the mall define who we are.
