‘This Is Our Time’ : And Architect Jon Jerde Is Trying to Write ‘a Different Urban Script’ for L.A.

When Jon Jerde first visited Europe in his early 20s, fresh from the USC School of Architecture, he was truly amazed by the urban civilization he encountered.

“Europe was a revelation to a green young Angeleno,” Jerde recalled. “Long periods of trial and error, of tuning and refining have gone into the creation of great cities like Paris, London, Rome or Amsterdam. But I realized that in America we really didn’t have the time to go through such a slow city growth. We needed a different urban script.”

This search for “a different urban script” to orchestrate the evolution of American cities has raised Jerde, 47, to national and international prominence. Along with Frank Gehry, Jerde is increasingly featured on the global design stage as L.A.’s quintessential architect. Where Gehry is celebrated as an architectural artist, Jerde’s reputation rests on his achievements as a designer of large-scale urban environments.

His vision for Los Angeles is taken from a panoramic perspective.

Cancer or Tulips?

“Photos of the Los Angeles metropolitan region taken from a high-altitude LANDSAT satellite resemble pictures of either a huge and malignant cancer, or vast field of tulips,” he said. “To me it is potentially either of these things, and that’s its unique glory.”

Los Angeles, defined as a continuously settled territory stretching from the Mexican border to the edges of the Silicon Valley, from the mid-Pacific to eastern Arizona, “is a third-millenium city without precedent in the history of urban settlement,” Jerde said. He is excited by what he sees as the region’s chance “to create a huge and wonderful mixing bowl for a great diversity of people, or a disaster on a grand scale.”

“This is our time,” he said. “When L.A. really begins to happen, everyone will be astounded. One way or another, the result will blow your socks off.”

Beyond his extremely busy role as president of the Jerde Partnership, an 80-strong professional practice on Sunset Boulevard in Silver Lake, Jerde is active in several groups concerned with raising local consciousness about issues of urban design.

Man of Many Jobs

Nominated by the Cultural Affairs Commission to the newly created Mayor’s Design Advisory Panel, Jerde also contributes to the LA 2000 Committee reviewing the city’s long-range options. In addition, he is vice president of the Urban Design Advisory Coalition, a group of top architectural and planning professionals formed to create a forum for the discussion and advocacy of urban issues.

The potentially influential Design Advisory Panel will have two main goals. One will be to establish a panel of architects to advise the Cultural Affairs Commission in its statutory responsibility of design review over projects on public sites. The other will be to select five or six major developments commissioned annually by municipal agencies for special treatment, such as attracting first-rate designers into the public arena by helping them speed their designs through the city bureaucracy.

“Los Angeles can rise to great occasions,” Jerde said. “Remember the 1984 Olympics? But why doesn’t everyday L.A. look and feel as great as it should? Why does our city cry out for coherence?”

The Jerde Partnership coordinated the design of the ’84 Olympics. With limited time and scant money, the Olympic design team transformed the Games venues, and several of the major boulevards, with a festive array of colorful, lightweight structures, street banners and a sprinkling of “fallen stars” that seemed to have been scattered over the metropolis by Olympian gods.

“If there were a special gold medal for creative ingenuity,” Time magazine wrote, “the U.S. Olympic design team should win it.”

Projects in Many Cities

The Jerde Partnership is engaged on a wide range of large-scale projects on several continents and is active in many U.S. cities. In Southern California, the partnership is best known for its designs for San Diego’s massive Horton Plaza downtown shopping center, the Westside Pavilion on Pico Boulevard, and downtown Los Angeles’ Seventh Market Place on Figueroa Street.

Horton Plaza is a typically bold Jerde design. A double-curved internal “street” slashes through the 11-acre, five-level complex. Bell towers, free-flying arches, Missionary style gables, and Moorish parapets jostle with a triangular corner chunk of multicolored mosaic copied from Florence’s San Miniato al Monte Cathedral.

“My desire is to bring people together in great urban places,” Jerde said. “The key to this revival of communal urban life in America, after decades of suburban isolation and alienation, is to transform the regional shopping center, that creature of the suburbs, into a place where people gather, mingle and interact.” Jerde has said: “Urban and suburban Americans seldom stroll aimlessly, as Europeans do, to parade and rub shoulders in a crowd. We need a destination, a sense of arrival at a definite location. My aim, in developments such as Horton Plaza and the Westside Pavilion, is to provide a destination that is also a public parade and a communal center.

L.A. an Ideal Lab

“Los Angeles, where the suburban city was first modeled on a major scale, is an ideal laboratory for this kind of urban evolution. Every city in the world has an element of L.A. built into its tensions and its shape.”

Jerde grew up against a background of the oil industry. His father, an oil rig construction foreman, traveled with his wife and son from drilling site to drilling site around the region.

“Oil field trash--that’s what folks called us,” Jerde, a compact, intense, quick-thinking man, said. “My mother was an alcoholic. My father was usually away working. As a lonely kid, I collected trash items and built them into back-yard constructions. I lived totally in my head and had no friends. Out of the garbage I modeled miniature buildings--post offices, a saloon, a spaceship, whole communities. I guess I’m still doing it, on a somewhat grander scale.”

The lonely child persists in the man. At his estate in Mandeville Canyon, dominated by an extraordinary house built of massive timbers reclaimed from the old wooden Venice Pavilion, Jerde likes to spend his evenings sitting alone in a redwood “throne” facing a deep gorge cut into the naked hillside. During last year’s “harmonic convergence” he descended with a few close friends into the depths of Arizona’s Canyon de Chelly to commune with the ghosts of the vanished Anasazi people who first settled the Southwest.

Seeking Peace, Love

“I’m a relic of the ‘60s,” he said, with a wry smile. “Yet another aging hippie, who likes to worship nature and dream of an age of synchronous passions, when all mankind will converge in peace and love.

“I guess my lonely childhood made it difficult for me to know how to relate intimately, to friends or family. My personal relationships have often been, well--awkward. Maybe I’ve compensated for this with a strong sense of sympathy for humanity at large.”

Married and divorced three times, father of a grown son and daughter and two little girls, Jerde lives alone but treasures a few close friends accumulated over the years of a hectic life spent in long hours of work and thousands of miles of occupational travel. But he always shines in public.

“Give Jon a platform or a stage and he’s amazing,” said Jane Pisano, director of the LA 2000 Committee. “His high energy level and his pragmatic experience make him very persuasive. What I appreciate most about Jon is his complete lack of cynicism. His ideas are always constructive and immensely hopeful.”

A Charming Idealist

“Jon is our fabulous front man,” said Jerde senior designer Bill De Eiel. “He can charm a bunch of tough-minded businessmen or politicians into letting him take incredible chances with their resources. Though he’s an idealist, they know they can trust him with their money.”

The idealism showed in an early professional policy document titled “Scripting the City,” in which Jerde described his intention to “revitalize the communal environment with the support of corporations and communities.”

Aiming for “colonies of cohesion in an act of co-creation” between architects, planners, clients, community activists, politicians, sociologists and others, Jerde hoped “to combine the series of isolated neighborhoods and ego-centered individual buildings that characterize our cities back into a coherent and humane environment.”

But first he had to find the means. Instead of isolating himself in the defensive and haughty antagonism most idealistic young architects develop in response to the “philistinism” of commercial clients, Jerde plunged into the heart of the business world.

Learned at Large Firm

In the mid-1960s he worked for Charles Kober Associates, a national design firm specializing in suburban shopping malls. At Kober, Jerde learned every aspect of the shopping center industry, from marketing and leasing to the economics of retail architecture.

“Gradually I pioneered radical changes in the character of these centers,” he said, “to integrate them into the communities they served, by making them truly public places, centers in every sense of the word. I began to see how such places, built and organized for purely commercial purposes, could energize a community, to the great benefit of tenants and owners, and to the people who use these shopping malls every day.”

His apprenticeship with Kober taught him to talk the language of the shopping center industry. In 1977, developer Ernie Hahn commissioned Jerde to design the $140-million Horton Plaza project, and Jerde opened his own office.

Described by Hahn as “the most exciting urban project in America,” Horton Plaza was acclaimed by the public, by the development community and by much of the architectural press on its opening in 1985.

‘Major Development’

“A major development of the genre,” wrote Architectural Record magazine. “One cannot argue with the center’s commercial success . . . even though Horton Plaza exhibits the shopping mall tendency to focus inward, away from the city’s streets and social problems.”

“Architects rarely get a chance to change a major urban form,” said architect Barton Myers. “Jon has transformed the market-formula shopping mall, an often grossly antisocial building type, into a great contributor to city life.

“I may have difficulty with the detailing of some of Jerde’s buildings,” Myers added, “but his urban design sense is excellent. The problem may be that Jon’s architecture is too much of a contemporary stage set, and so may quickly date. And his architecture is all too easy to parody. You already see a great many crude copies of Jerde malls popping up all over the place.”

“It’s no longer an abstract quarrel among architects over good taste versus bad taste,” Jerde said. “The struggle now is over pro-human design versus the anti-human kind we see all about us in our cities.

Profits Come First

“The fact is, almost all of our clients are mean, bottom-line, street market-wise developers. They are exciting people, full of energy and ideas, but making communal places is incidental to making profits. You have to get down and dirty to convince them to give you the opportunities you crave.” But, Jerde said, “The call for ‘Fountainhead’-type heroics among designers is now zero. What we need are creators who can make places, not monuments to personal or corporate glory.”

Gehry is “the true anti-hero of Southern California architecture,” Jerde added. “He’s made us think about the whole business of making architecture, by challenging its pomposity and its permanence, its modernist elitism and its spurious claim to rationality.

“The irony is, Gehry’s better understood and appreciated everywhere else than here. But then, Los Angeles itself is yet to be understood as a unique and fertile phenomenon, without precedent in the history of cities.”

Jerde repeated his key credo with a smile.

“We have an extraordinary opportunity in Los Angeles, here and now,” he said. “Cancer or tulips--the choice is up to us.”