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The Apocalyptic Architecture of One 1970s Retail Chain
- draw_down 8y agoReally cool buildings. I had never heard of this at all, and I even lived near one of the buildings apparently. Thanks for posting!
- xiconfjs 8y agothank you for the link.
- classichasclass 8y agoI remember Best, but mostly from the dying days. There was one in my So Cal hometown with the later staggered red letter logo but it was just a regular strip mall anchor store, not these gloriously inspired monstrosities. Sometimes corporations can have a sense of the delightful.
- protomyth 8y agoI remember them from their acquisition of Labelle's. They really cheaped out on that store and went out of business not long after. Labelle's was all class, and Best was not. I remember Labelle's for the amazing article in the Grand Forks Herald describing their parking lot as some nightmare creation of a clearly insane civil engineer and a drunk mathematician. To bad the article is before the flood, and they didn't seem to understand the concept of backups.
- teej 8y agoI immediately recognized the second picture from growing up in Baltimore, MD. It turns out that James Wines is a graduate of Towson High (class of '51) just 2 miles from where the Towson Best store was.
- duxup 8y agoI hadn't thought of suburban strip mall like stores as an opportunity like that but there they are big buildings being built and rebuilt all the time. Too bad we don't have anyone willing to try such things now. I need to get on my city planning board (or whomever approves these things) and set a "no normal buildings" rule.
- tomjakubowski 8y agoFry's brick and mortar stores might be the closest thing. There's one that has a flying saucer crashed into it.
- chiph 8y agoThe one in Austin Texas ("Live Music Capital of the World") appropriately has a grand piano on it.
- classichasclass 8y agoThe Roseville one has a train motif complete with steam locomotive coming out over the entrance. Not sure that's earthquake ready. Naturally Vegas has a slot machine.
- brazzledazzle 8y agoI’ve seen an Alice in Wonderland themed one and an Atlantis store (complete with giant aquariums). They have another one but I think the theme is a musty dimly lit electronics store with questionable returned merchandise restocking policies.
- thaumasiotes 8y ago> with questionable returned merchandise restocking policies Heh, I got an mp3 player new from Fry's once. It came with a large number of songs.
- JdeBP 8y agoIn the context of that and the earlier mention of planning boards, the history of the Headington Shark in Oxford, U.K. might prove to be interesting reading for those unaware of it.
- Hupriene 8y agoNot exactly an architectural masterpiece but Jungle Jim's in Cincinnati is home to whole lot of second hand amusement park kitsch. http://media.cmgdigital.com/shared/lt/lt_cache/thumbnail/960/img/photos/2012/05/06/cb/ff/ncg031112bizjungle_1097990a_1.jpg http://media.cmgdigital.com/shared/lt/lt_cache/thumbnail/960... http://www.musicbyencore.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/JungleJims_Cigar_Festival_SnakeHouse_exterior.jpg http://www.musicbyencore.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/20...
- Sniffnoy 8y agoSome of these are neat, but it seems to me the problem with making your building look abandoned is that passers-by might just conclude it is abandoned and not come closer to take a look.
- mortenjorck 8y agoFascinating. I'd say these kind of run the gamut from inspired (the "Tilt Building" cuts a memorable profile with just a single plane) to kitsch ("Inside/Out" would have been lovely as an actual structural expressionist piece, but the brick effect is a big, unnecessary "get it?"). Retail architecture doesn't have to be post-modern to be interesting, but it's a shame so much of it today is so aggressively inoffensive.
- draw_down 8y agoEverything is! Not just retail. I live in an apartment building that could be described that way, office spaces... the list goes on.
- AlphaWeaver 8y agoThis reminds me of the famous children's entertainment venue / science museum Wonderworks [0] whose building is constructed to appear upside down entirely. [0]: https://www.google.com/search?q=wonderworks&prmd=ivns&tbm=isch&sa=X https://www.google.com/search?q=wonderworks&prmd=ivns&tbm=is...
- bobo_legos 8y agoI remember going to Best as a kid all throughout the 80s. This was the store in Langhorne Pa. https://architectureandbranding.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/best-langhorne-pa.jpg?w=460&h=172 https://architectureandbranding.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/...
- chriselles 8y agoThanks for that. I visited the same store as a child as well.
- softbuilder 8y agoI was telling someone about Best the other day. They show my hometown store in Sacramento. It looked like the corner had exploded out. I always thought that was just a one-off and it was only that particular store with the weird architecture. I had never been to another Best. They had a weird business model too as I (barely) recall. You didn't usually go there and buy a product and take it home. It was a showroom for products that were in a catalog. You would order what you wanted from the catalog and then come back a few days later and they would have it for you. I bought a calculator watch there in grade school, which was very exciting. However the experience was so odd, even for that time, that I never bought anything else from them.
- pwg 8y agoThe Best showrooms that were in Northern VA operated in that the store was arranged similar to a WalMart or Target today (rows of shelves), but instead of taking your item from that shelf, you wrote down its catalog number on a slip (an 'order form' as it were). You'd then go up front to stand in line and pay for the items on your slip at a cashier, whereupon the catalog numbers were entered into their system. This resulted in your products arriving up from a basement (or down from a 2nd floor depending on which store) warehouse on a conveyor belt to a 'pickup area' (reminiscent of an airport luggage carousel, only with employees working the conveyor belt). Those employees would then hand your items to you and you would leave with them.
- mgkimsal 8y ago"Service Merchandise" in the Detroit area was like that too.
- Infernal 8y agoI believe "Service Merchandise" was nationwide - they used to have a reasonably solid Christmas catalog up into the early 90's. Them and Sears and J.C. Penney's, I would spend hours leafing through them during the Christmas season - so many cool toys.
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- mc32 8y agoThat's some pretty whimsical architecture. It's be nice if a future retailer looking for some initial buzz picked up the habit. Their "distressed" facade, looked even more distressed after it was undressed[1]. On a side note, it reminds me of (at least) houses in Greece not getting technically completed on purpose to avoid taxation of some form[2]. Also, they are whimsical, even avant guarde designs, but I wouldn't call it apocalyptic. [1]https://web.archive.org/web/20060827012947/http://www.texaschapbookpress.com/magellanslog54/indeterminatefacadeintro.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20060827012947/http://www.texasc... [2]https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/27662/do-greeks-evade-taxes-by-not-finishing-their-houses https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/27662/do-greeks...
- dver 8y agoPaid my way through college working for Best. It was minimum wage. $3.05/hr at the time, unloading 60 ft trailers in 100 degree heat in the late summer. That notwithstanding we actually had medical/dental and paid vacation time. Often thought if they'd made it longer, it was a pretty close approximation to online shopping. Look at an example on the floor and then order from the warehouse upstairs.
- gniv 8y ago> Look at an example on the floor and then order from the warehouse upstairs. So.. like Ikea?
- function_seven 8y agoSorta. At Ikea (at least near me), you have to go find the items on the warehouse shelf yourself, and bring them to the registers still. At Best (and Service Merchandise) you collected tickets for the items you wanted and brought those up to the front. They'd enter your order, you'd pay and wait. The items would be picked and sent on a conveyor to the front.
- ginko 8y agoBetter than Ikea, then.
- rwmj 8y agoSo like Argos?
- nimchimpsky 8y agoThe laminate book of dreams
- LiquidFlux 8y agoDo Argos' have showrooms or open floors? My experience, 10 years back, was limited to a looking through a catalogue, punching in a barcode into their stock checking device, and waiting for our number to appear on the screen in the waiting area after having paid.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- fourmii 8y agoThose buildings are so cool! Sad that there isn't any will to preserve them. And those pictures are awesome too, I'm going to be wasting a lot of time now Googling Best and SITE buildings now...
- newman8r 8y agoReminds me of the concept of a stone mason's folly. I built one in the desert with dry stone masonry and two bbq pits. Fun project.
- TipVFL 8y agoWow, I really like some of those. I'm surprised that I've never even heard of that company. There are more pictures available at the source: http://www.siteenvirodesign.com/content/best-products http://www.siteenvirodesign.com/content/best-products
- homero 8y agoThese existed?
- TipVFL 8y agoThere's one there that's a parking lot that ripples and the store is under the ripples, and it's only shown as a model. I'm guessing that one was never built, because it looks really dangerous and confusing for drivers.
- marssaxman 8y agoI remember the one in Sacramento, with the corner that slid in and out. I didn't know there were others at the time, nor did I realize how unusual an architectural experiment it really was.
- mdrzn 8y agoThere are such cool designs that it's a shame nobody nowadays tries anything similar.
- Kagerjay 8y agoYou would be surprised :) There's a company called WonderWorks that embodies this style https://www.wonderworksonline.com/# https://www.wonderworksonline.com/#
- ggm 8y agoMy mother was an art and architecture historian in the Edinburgh college of art in the 60s, 70s and 80s and I recall her showing me these, in a very fine book of the architect. I think a degree of playfulness in buildings is good. Sometimes you want clean lines and minimalism but sometimes you get a better connection to people by doing these things. I have no sense if they actually were functionally easy to maintain and workable but they certainly stood out in my mind. I recognized the frontage immediately, from a book I haven't seen in over thirty years.
- dexterdog 8y agoThere was a Best that opened near me when I was growing up. It was in Lawrenceville, NJ. It wasn't as cool as some of these. It was just kind of a square building, but the second floor was rotated about three degrees. It took an otherwise very bland building and made it totally memorable and I still consider it to be the Best building when I see it.
- xattt 8y agoHow will Apple Stores age when they’ve outlived their usefulness? Will they fade into the walls and disappear from the landscape, or will other businesses move into them but continue to live on in the same spirit as old Pizza Huts?
- lewisflude 8y agoWhen Apple stores close, there are specialists called in to use mallets to destroy the floors and displays. (Saw this on Reddit, can't find a source at the moment sadly.)
- Yhippa 8y agoI grew up in Richmond and thought the Best location there was an anomaly. It was so cool though. The picture doesn't do it justice. When you walk between the gap from the front of the building to the entrance it felt like you were in a terrarium. Because of the gap there was such a distinctive earthy, peaty smell to the whole thing. I did not understand how rare a design was at the time. Interesting fact: Sydney (who ran the company) and his wife Francis Lewis (an art collector) from what I understand had an unfathomably large amount of modern art located somewhere under Richmond, Va. They have a wing of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts named after them and donated quite a bit of art to the museum.
- i_am_nomad 8y agoI also grew up in Richmond, and in fact my dad worked at Best. The corporate headquarters up in Ashland had a really impressive collection of modern art.
- amyjess 8y agoI loved Best when I was a kid, and I was so sad when they disappeared. I never knew they liked to do cool stuff with architecture. There were one or two locations in the Dallas area, and now I really wish I remembered what the buildings looked like.
- masonic 8y agoAh, the Catalog Showroom era. In the Bay Area, Consumer's Distributing came first. Best Products came later. Service Merchandise came West after that. There was another small chain called something like DAG or DAK (not the Drew Allan Kaplan operation). There was a showroom of theirs near Camden and Union in San Jose near Campbell.
- ConceptJunkie 8y agoWe used to go to the "Peeling Building" in Richmond when I was a kid. That almost looks like my Dad's Olds 442 in the photo. I've looked for the building on Google Maps and Street View, but don't recall exactly where it was on the Midlothian Turnpike. Best was the Best Buy of its day. I remember being fascinated by the pneumatic tube system in the store, something you only see now in bank drive-throughs.
- S_A_P 8y agoI grew up in Houston and still remember my dad pulling a dad joke on me. We drove by best and he said that building is falling apart why are they letting people shop there?!? I was 4-5 yrs old at the time and I got genuinely worried before he burst out laughing. Today that site still exists but it’s been “fixed” here’s a link from one of my favorite series on the chron.com page. https://blog.chron.com/bayoucityhistory/2008/11/then-now-14/ https://blog.chron.com/bayoucityhistory/2008/11/then-now-14/
- rypskar 8y ago451 Unavailable For Legal Reasons Guess yet another site that decided to not care about visitors privacy so block all in EU instead of behaving
- draw_down 8y agoMaybe, or maybe a newspaper in Texas isn’t too concerned about the EU’s definition of privacy. I think part of supporting GDPR is being honest about the fact that it’s not purely positive for end users.