The Northgate Mall Redevelopment, located in El Paso, Texas, is a town center project won in a competition organized by the City of El Paso. Moule & Polyzoides was the architect and planner on a team led by the Hunt Industries. The project is deployed on the 31-acre site of a failed mall and is located in the suburbs of the city. The local transit authority has designated the site as a bus rapid transit terminal, where residents from the edges of the metropolitan area can arrive by car, then park and ride a bus to the downtown.
The program is a complex mix of 300,000 square feet of retail, restaurant, entertainment and office space and 450 units of housing, 20% of them affordable. Parking is provided in a rich array of different places, such as garages, streets and the middle of blocks, all hidden from the public realm. The scheme is organized on a grid of slow streets and blocks that allow for various methods of parking appropriate to the building types. The main commercial ground floor space is organized as a main street terminating in a square. Residences are designed in a variety of housing types with upper floors are designed as flexible lofts. Architectural form is scaled to the intimate experience of shopping and walking outdoors, while its styles are finely mixed from contemporary to traditional, adjusted to the demands of a hot and dry desert climate.