Selling California at Market Value
Opened recently in the Century City Shopping Center--just in time to offer the holiday crush of consumers some diversion and delights--is a market hall and a complex of 14 movie theaters.
The hall, christened the Marketplace and fronting on Santa Monica Boulevard a block west of Century City’s meld of Modernist-styled steel-and-glass office towers, is particularly welcome and engaging.
In contrast to the neighboring sterile structures, the Marketplace is a lively, brightly painted, soaring two-story stucco, utilitarian pavilion, edged with colorful awnings and inviting terraces, and topped by a hipped, terra-cotta-toned metal roof.
Designed by Benjamin Thompson & Associates of Cambridge, with an assist locally by architect James Pulliam, the decidedly upscale project has the scale and structure of a Victorian train station and the mass and materials of a sprightly Southern California mission.
The oversize shed is the latest variation in a design theme for which Thompson has gained an international reputation and which he has been pursuing for more than a decade, beginning in 1976 with the renovation of the Quincy Market in downtown Boston.
There, in association with developer James Rouse, he took a neglected complex of old buildings in a historic setting and turned them into what has become known as a festival marketplace, a pleasant complex of colorful shops and eateries. This blend in various forms has become a common commercial element in the gentrification of select urban neighborhoods.
Festival marketplaces designed by Thompsom have since risen at New York City’s South Street Seaport and Baltimore’s Harborplace, among other places. Though these once decrepit waterfront settings have been sanitized and secured to make them attractive to the touring suburbanite, there remains enough of a sense of place and history to set them off from being just another adult theme park.
But in overtly Modern and homogenized Century City there obviously was not much from which Thompson could draw an inspiration other than a romantic image of Southern California and its benign weather--and memories of Main Streets. The result is a comfortable, controlled melange, though while not evocative as an exotic bazaar, or relaxed as a farmers’ market, neither is it a bland collection of shopping-mall eateries.
Setting the tone of the Marketplace are some attractive exterior graphics and decorations, including hand-painted ceramic tiles and murals. Check out the stylized bird that serves as the hall’s logo and the fish mural. An excess of planters and planting areas hint at lush landscaping to come, which should enhance the outdoor eating areas that are slowly being activated.
Within the hall, under a web of wood trusses bracing a wood ceiling, is a calculated clutter that seeks to create the mood of an open-air food market lined with cafes and restaurants. There is the beginning of a promise of a variety of booths, vendors and sit-down establishments offering at upscale prices a variety of gourmet, ethnic, fresh and fast foods that can be consumed inside the hall, on the terraces outside or at home.
Diversity is the constant. Among the five sit-down establishments within the 60,000-square-foot hall is an Italian seafood restaurant, a New York deli, an American bar and grill, an English brasserie, and a Chinese dim sum palace. Some were still in the last throes of getting ready to open when I toured the hall last week.
In a gesture to the Southern California climate, the Marketplace has no heating or air conditioning, but instead depends upon a temperature sensitive, energy-efficient system of fans and operable louvers and windows. The system promises to capture the wonderful aromas of the food being cooked within the hall.
While not as competitive or gritty as a traditional produce market, such as the venerable Grand Central Market on Broadway in downtown Los Angeles, or as relaxed as Farmers Market in the Fairfax District, the Century City Marketplace does have an informality that, however studied, does encourage eating, lingering and people-watching. You cannot ask more of a public space these days.
