From Universal CityWalk to San Diego’s Horton Plaza, from the Glendale Galleria to Japan’s Canal City, architect Jon Jerde’s malls bring millions of people together. So why did he feel so alone?
Glendale Galleria - the mall opened on October 14, 1976. The architect was Jon Jerde, who credited his design to a Ray Bradbury essay on reviving retail districts.
Horton Plaza is the first example of architect Jon Jerde's so-called "experience architecture". When it opened in August 1985, it was a risky and radical departure from the standard paradigm of mall design.
The landmark project that catapulted Sussman/Prejza onto the international stage was the graphics and wayfinding system for the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics. Working with architect Jon Jerde, Sussman/Prejza created pedestrian wayfinding signs, transportation signs, facility identification signs, and other graphics. With its punchy colors, geometric shapes and symbols, and the classically shaped signage structures, the system oozed 1980s PoMo.
CityWalk is a shopping mall that refuses to be a shopping mall, where we’re desperate consumers of one another’s company. It offers an 18-screen multiplex, a blues bar, a bowling alley, 28 restaurants, and several dozen shops, but it gives away the best of itself for free. CityWalk is not L.A.’s Piazza San Marco, its Champs-Elysees, its 42nd Street and Broadway, but it comes closer than anyplace else we’ve got. By 8 p.m. our own Broadway is a netherworld of shuttered storefronts. Hollywood and Vine is a specter of the splendid crossroads that went wild on V-J Day. Only at CityWalk can we experience a New Year’s Eve countdown as frenzied and convivial as Times Square’s.
When CityWalk opened in 1993, the critics were brutal. CityWalk, they said, had ripped off its architecture from greater L.A., as if L.A. itself wasn’t a mishmash of styles—mission, Moorish, Mayan, Tudor, beaux arts—borrowed from every city on the planet. It was, the critics maintained, a crass shopping and entertainment center masquerading as public space. But CityWalk has pleased the public enormously—70 million have congregated there.
In Southern California alone, Jerde is responsible for the Glendale Galleria, the Westside Pavilion, Newport Beach’s Fashion Island, Del Mar Plaza, and San Diego’s Horton Plaza, West Hollywood Gateway. He rehabilitated a chunk of downtown Las Vegas with the Fremont Street Experience, while his Bellagio master plan sparked the building boom that has brought the world’s great cities in miniature to the Strip.
It was Los Angeles architect Jon Jerde who was among the first to understand the interdependence between the act of walking and the construction of a sense of place. A trailblazer and key figure in LA pop culture, he applied the place-making method to the shopping mall architectural typology. Jerde’s projects were influenced by Ray Bradbury’s essay “The Aesthetics of Lostness” and sought to build a city for “shopper flâneurs,” where people could spend an afternoon wandering around, getting safely lost.
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http://apalosangeles.org/walking-as-a-luxury-activity-a-lesson-in-urban-design-from-the-late-jon-jerde/
