So it’s finally finished. In 1999, Henry Sy said that it would take 5-10 years to build this 7-billion peso monstrosity; nice to know that the construction was completed on the lower end of his guesstimate.
Interestingly, the 3rd largest mall in the world occupies a land area that is less than twice the size of SM Megamall (MoA - 19.5 hectares, Megamall - 10.5 hectares) and has a gross floor area that is only slightly larger (MoA - 381,075 sqm, Megamall - 331,679 sqm).
Design-wise, I can’t say I’m too impressed with the exterior architecture of this mall. It seems to try too hard to slough off the shoe-box look (a visual pun of the highest order) that SM has been known for all these decades, instead going for the freestyle architecture of malls like Shangri-la Plaza and Greenbelt 3. (The blue arches decorating the carpark building, in particular, seem like a child’s interpretation of GB3’s gracefully nordic frameworks.) I appreciate the attempt, but Mall of Asia’s exterior doesn’t seem to have any of the originality of the other two malls. That said, neither West Edmonton Mall or South China Mall (two other malls vying for the title of "largest mall in the world") are really much to look at either. I guess it’s just hard to come up with a very unified look when you’ve got that much land to cover.
Here’s a brief table of how Mall of Asia stacks up to the competition:
| Mall | Gross Floor Area |
Number of Stores |
Number of Parking Slots |
| Mall of Asia | 381,075 sqm | 500 (initially) | 5,000 |
| West Edmonton Mall | 492,386 sqm | 600 | 22,000 |
| South China Mall | 891,869 sqm | 1,500 (!) | 8,000 |
| Golden Resources Mall (also in China) |
678,192 sqm | 1,000 | ? |
(Most of these statistics were taken from ECSU’s Shopping Malls Studies page.)
By 2010, we can expect the Mall of Asia to drop out of the global top 10 completely. As this page points out, 7 of the world’s 10 largest malls will soon all be in China.