Flip a Strip: National Architectural Design Competition at SMoCA

The Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art [SMoCA] announces a major design competition and public exhibition, "Flip a Strip."

This innovative project will foster creative, new visions for the renovation of the small-scale strip shopping plazas that line the streets of this metropolitan area-and virtually every suburban zone in the country.

"Flip a Strip" continues SMoCA's commitment to creating a forum for public issues of both local and national importance and to generating ideas that better the quality of civic life.

In oversupply yet vastly underused, such strip plazas (built a generation ago) define the streetscapes of many towns.

Many are dilapidated eyesores.

Yet many are home to small restaurants, sole proprietorships and mom-and-pop businesses that can be wonderfully unique, entrepreneurial concerns, highly responsive to community needs.

Strip malls breed strange and wonderful bedfellows (a yoga studio next to pet grooming next to a mattress store, for example), yet are plagued by interspersed vacant storefronts and the most generic of designs.

Ringed by parking and adjacent to thriving neighborhoods, these strip malls have great potential for adaptive re-use and architectural upgrades.

They are an undervalued and neglected building stock.

This competition will look at options for making strip malls economically viable, aesthetically interesting and communally meaningful.