Jon Jerde

In the summer of ‘84, a television audience of 2 billion people sat down to watch the Olympic Games-- and Los Angeles. Instead of the predictable red, white and blue, the city appeared draped in magenta, vermilion, yellow and aqua. The Games also took place amid ephemeral struc- tures made of cardboard, fabric and fancy. Balloons, murals and wafting pennants lined the boulevards. It was a pivotal 16 days for the city; the world discovered that Los Angeles had replaced its out- moded reputation for ennui and sprawl with culture, cuisine and a sense of humor. And what it lacked in grace, it clearly made up for in style. In the following pages, we offer some of the high points--and the high-profile practitioners--of that style, including the likes of architect Jon Jerde and color consultant Deborah Sussman, who together gave the city its look for the Olympics and still shape its skyline, and Susan Feniger and Mary Sue Milliken, taste-making chefs with the courage to improvise. We’ve also united rising stars in entertainment with their counterparts in fashion for a sneak preview of L.A. designers’ fall collections. Their contributions propel Los Angeles forward, making it, in Jerde’s words, “the place where things are going to happen . . . the city of the future.”

Jon Jerde, 46, has had more impact on Southern California’s shifting cityscape in recent years than almost any other architect. His prolific firm, the Jerde Partnership,designed the Westside Pavilion, Horton Plaza in San Diego and the temporary structures for the 1984 Summer Olympics. Its most recent project is Seventh Market Place at Citicorp Center in downtown Los Angeles, and it has begun work on a Disneyland near Paris. Q: With its playful shapes, contrasting styles and distinctive coloring, your architecture certainly announces itself. What are you trying to say? A: That this is the quality of our pluralistic society. Certainly it is not rational and ordered, as the clean lines and pure styles of modern architecture suggest, but actually a great mass of variety and vitality, even messiness. We try to reflect the marvelous, humanistic quality of our society. The designs look like a gazpacho because our society is a gazpacho. Q: Your concerns are with the city’s urban fabric, and your designs can be described as a sort of popular post-modernism. Where do you live , and in what style house? A: I live with my wife and children in a Mediterranean-style house in Hollywood Knolls, one of those great Southern California hillside communities created in the late 1920s. It has all the aspects of an Italian hill town--the cohesive architecture, cohesive landscape and great, meandering street scenes. And it has a sense of community. Q: The Southern California landscape is changing dramatically . Where do you see it heading? A: I hope to a greater sense of community. Up until now, the growth has been suburban, and, by the nature of its sprawl, offered no clear view of an evolving community. But people are becoming more aware of the need for a sense of place. It is a problem bigger than designing a building but smaller than planning a city. Q: Certainly bigger than designing a shopping center, for which you are noted. A: Yes, but there are lessons to be learned from designing a shopping center. Shopping is a communal act, but for the most part most centers have simply been odd objects unrelated to their context. My firm has been trying both to have them reflect the community and to integrate them into the community--in effect transform them into vital main streets of the kind that have been lost in our suburban sprawl. Q: Was it this concern that shaped your firm’s design of the temporary structures for the Olympics? A: Yes. Just as shopping is a communal event, the Olympics were a communal event. Here we had a city famous for its lack of communality and lack of public spaces in which we were trying to create through 160 events a communal experience. We did this by manipulating something we called a kit of parts--made up of booths, landscaping, structures and decorations, color--to create an appropriate background for a shared human experience. It worked and it was wonderful. Q: What did the Olympic experien c e teach you as a designer? A: It confirmed my view that there is a powerful shift, a cultural shift, deep in the guts of the masses, in L.A. and in other cities around the United States, to experience community, to feel an identity and pride in their community. The Olympics were transitory, a festival, a moment. The city, of course, is more enduring, more eternal. But it is the same challenge: to create a sense of community. Q: You talk a lot about designing for community , but architecture traditionally has been more concerned with the single building as a piece of sculpture on a landscape. Do you see architecture shifting to the broader concerns of urban design? A: Architects will always try to create that one building that stands out, but there has been of late a healthy recognition that the spaces between the big-deal buildings really have a much more powerful potential to influence the quality of life of people, and of cities. Q: Where do you get your inspiration? A: Everywhere, from every street and scene that is brimming with life. It is a sensitivity that I honed after graduating from USC and winning the school’s Architectural Guild traveling fellowship, which allowed me a year of world travel to observe the monuments and cities of the past. However, as I traveled, my interest was drawn not to the historical buildings but rather to the vernacular architecture that made up the public spaces of the great cities, such as Paris, London and Rome. It was astonishing to realize what great expression for public life could be accomplished with rather humble buildings. Q: You could work and live anywhere in the world , but you have chosen to stay in Los Angeles. Why? A: The wonderful thing about L.A. is that it is still young enough to have its cannons loose on the deck. It is malleable. It is youthful. It is the place where things are going to happen. It is the city of the future, and I want to be a part of it.