Run-of-the-Mill Mall? Not at All : Architecture: Tustin Market Place’s unrelenting starkness and unusual colors have inspired some spirited squabbling. All agree on one thing: It sure stands out.

Like some kind of shopping siren, the reddish-brown, rectangular-block buildings beckon the Gelorminos every couple of weeks from the comfort of their Garden Grove home.

They pack their two children into the car and take the 25-minute Saturday afternoon drive to Orange County’s newest--and most controversial--retail complex, where they make their regular rounds through the home improvement, clothing and toy stores.

Despite the attraction, though, Tustin Market Place leaves them cold.

“We like to stroll, to window-shop, but here you have to drive to get from one end of the center to the other,” said Christiane Gelormino of the 77-acre, outdoor, U-shaped complex, where most of the stores on the rim surround a 4,000-space parking lot.

“It’s awfully bleak, isn’t it?” asked Mike Gelormino as he surveyed the unrelenting starkness of the main buildings, with their huge terra-cotta walls.

“It looks more like a desert stronghold than a user-friendly shopping center,” he said. “To us, it’s more like Mojave.”

It has been called much worst.

The most vociferous critic is Ursula Kennedy, a former Tustin city councilwoman who was mayor when the first phase opened in fall, 1988. She still considers Tustin Market Place, which is at Jamboree Road and the Santa Ana Freeway, an enormous eyesore.

“It’s still too garish, too oppressive,” said Kennedy, who retired from the council a year ago. “It isn’t Tustin. It doesn’t belong here.”

One of Kennedy’s favorite taunts is keyed to the walled-in aura of the complex and the eight, 90-foot, white tower sculptures that double as lighting fixtures for the parking lot.

“There are some people,” she said, “who still joke about the place looking like a fortress, like some kind of prison, and that those towers are like guard lookouts.”

But community defenders praise the Market Place as a triumphant piece of creative daring and denounce its foes as shortsighted, timid souls.

Opponents’ attacks “are cheap shots,” City Councilman Earl J. Prescott said. “Why should we build another one of those pastel-and-tile centers? This design is offbeat, but it’s adventurous; it’s exciting.”

Such is the polarization of opinions over the Irvine Co.’s $90-million Tustin retail and entertainment complex, which hopes to celebrate the virtual completion of its third and last phase this summer.

To many, the complex is a case of love--or hate--at first sight. The great severity of the structures, as well as the brilliance of the colors, have made Tustin Market Place an instant landmark--and conversation piece--unlike any other county shopping complex.

But the project’s planners and designers prefer to view these critical outbursts, even the notoriety, byproducts of architectural trailblazing.

“We believe this is the first retail project of this kind in this region, perhaps the country,” said architect Leason Pomeroy, whose Irvine-based LPA firm collaborated with famed Mexican architect Ricardo Legorreta on the project.

Pomeroy added, “If you’re out there on the cutting edge, if you’re trying to do something new and so obviously different, you expect to get a lot of flak.”

Although the site is large enough for a standard super-mall, no such complex was seriously considered.

“Naturally,” Mayor Richard B. Edgar said, “we wanted a Fashion Island here, but that was wishful thinking. The reality is that South Coast Plaza exists on one side of us, and the Irvine Co. still wants to build their super-mall on the other side of us,” near the Y junction of the San Diego and Santa Ana freeways.

Instead, the Irvine Co. announced in early 1987 that the Tustin complex would be anchored by a row of high-volume home improvement stores.

In a bid to create a new kind of retail center with stylish respectability, the company sought to combine the home improvement group--housewares, furnishing and garden stores--with a section for clothing, electronics, sporting and toy firms, plus another for movie theaters, book and record shops, restaurants and fast-food outlets.

And it would house these mass-merchandising companies--geared to quick off-and-on freeway access--in eye-catching structures unlike any seen in boulevard strips or local mini-centers, the usual haunts for such businesses.

“We didn’t want schlock. The last thing we wanted to do was recreate a strip-type center,” said Glenn Myers, vice president for development for Donahue Schriber, the Newport Beach firm that operates Tustin Market Place.

But there were certain built-in limits. “All that these high-volume stores want for a building is a big box,” Myers said. “They want something bare and simple for maximum operating efficiency and for maintaining their lower-cost image.”

In Legorreta, the Irvine Co. hired a big-name architect whose style, from residences to office towers and resort hotels, is typically based on the starkest no-nonsense simplicity.

To Pomeroy, who has worked with Legorreta on the huge Solana office project in the Dallas-Ft. Worth area, Legorreta was a dream choice for the Tustin project.

“He’s the architect’s architect,” Pomeroy said. “He does more than design buildings. He creates urban sculptures.”

In the view of Pomeroy and other local architects, the Mexican architect’s design for Tustin Market Place was typical Legorreta--the precise rectangular structures, the imposing mass of walls, the sense of both earthy solidity and soaring whimsy, the unrestrained, glowing colors.

Legorreta’s design “was exactly what we sought--a piece of powerful art that was also highly functional,” said architect Roger Seitz, the Irvine Co.’s vice president of planning and urban design. “It wasn’t your stereotypical Taco Bell buildings. It wasn’t your color-bland center done in conservative grays and 35 shades of beige.”

While some of the Tustin complex’s merchant tenants were not at first as thrilled with the Legorreta concept, they went along with the plan, which also imposed uniform color and sign codes.

Other tenant businessmen, however, were downright effusive about the design. Tim Thomas, who opened an art gallery and was a key figure in the merchants’ organization, said: “Luckily, we didn’t get the standard, assembly-line, run-of-the-mill model.”

But, he added, “anything this daring is bound to become a target. You can bet on it.”

The uprising--and with it the Great Purple Tempest--was not not long in coming.

Although City Council members seemed to accept the overall plan for the complex, some began to have second thoughts about the original color scheme.

“We realized it was unorthodox,” Mayor Edgar said of the initial stages, “but as long as it didn’t seem excessive, I felt comfortable with the design.”

The problem, though, was one of life-size scale, he said: “When you see it (colors) in samples, it doesn’t hit you the same way. But when you see it in place, on the actual walls, it can look so different and startling.”

The most sweeping color change came early in 1988, before all the concrete, stucco-textured buildings in the first phase were put up. Originally, a far stronger terra-cotta color was to be used. But, Edgar said: “We felt that shade turned out too glaring.”

A less vibrant shade of reddish-brown--the color still on the buildings--was used instead.

But the issue that touched off the noisiest backlash--the deep purple used on an huge, eight-foot-tall sign wall facing the Santa Ana Freeway--came several weeks after the first phase opened in October, 1988.

Community protesters, with then-Mayor Kennedy at the vanguard, attacked not only the purple wall but also the terra-cotta color, saying the whole project clashed with the tile-roof, Mediterranean-white style being used or planned for the new homes and auto sales center next to the shopping complex.

While the terra-cotta on the buildings remained intact, the Irvine Co. agreed to repaint the freeway-fronting wall from deep purple to the basic reddish-brown. As a show of civic harmony, the repainting ceremony was led by Kennedy and company planning chief Seitz.

The company’s strategic withdrawal was bigger than dumping the deep purple. It also shelved the original plans for extensive use of purples, yellows, oranges and pinks within the complex, as festive counterpoint to the stark terra-cotta walls.

A footnote: Later, with hardly any fuss, the Irvine Co. went back to repaint just the freeway-fronting sign wall. It restored purple as background for the white sign letters, but in a softer shade.

Today, the look of the complex “is watered down,” said Jim Lloyd, regional real-estate director for Home Depot, one of the complex’s chief tenants. “The original, full color plan gave it punch, a certain jauntiness. It’s a shame. They (protesters) took the guts out of it.”

But complaints linger over the vastness of the complex and parking lot and just how friendly it is to shoppers.

The most vocal critics, not surprisedly, are smaller merchants who depend on foot traffic.

“Most of us were already hurting from the recession and the impacts from the war,” said interior design specialist Lisa Cohen of Windoware Concepts. “It’s crucial for us to draw more people walking over from the bigger stores--and that’s very hard to do in a strictly auto-oriented center.”

Shoppers Louis and Cathy Paneque of Fullerton agreed.

“Usually we drive straight to a particular business, like Stor or Home Depot or Chick’s, and then it’s back on the freeway,” he said. “We don’t usually stick around, because it’s not conducive for walking around, except in the movie (Edwards six-plex theater) section.”

In that newly opened section, the Paneques said, the scale is much smaller and folksier--there are arcades, a fountain, smaller shops and accents of pinks and yellows and purples against the section’s overall lighter, desert-tan color.

The Irvine Co. and the Donahue Schriber management insist that the complex will remain an auto-dominated development.

Nevertheless, they said, they are considering shopper shuttles, and once the Edwards section is fully occupied--by restaurants, book and video stores--that area will become more popular for strolling and browsing.

The color issue, however, remains in the wings.

While company planners said moves to restore more of the original bright colors remain on the shelf, they talk of eventually bringing that matter back to the city.

Meanwhile, planners and merchants alike agreed that color--for better or worse--has done more than anything else to put Tustin Market Place on the map.

“You can’t miss us when you drive by,” art gallery proprietor Thomas said. “The designers have seen to that--it sticks out and hits you in the eye.

“You got people pointing us out and remembering all the bickering and saying, ‘Hey, this must be that big fortress--or this must be the purple-wall place.’

“What the heck,” Thomas said, “at least people know us!”