ARCHITECTURE : Westside Pavilion: Old-Style Mall Turned Into an Assault on Senses

Architect John Jerde, the Los Angeles-based designer of such giant shopping emporiumsas the Westside Pavilion, San Diego’s Horton Plaza and the proposed Hollywood Promenade, tries to make good shopping malls.

He strives to make these temples of consumption into active places where light, color, texture and scale conspire to create a richly textured environment. He tries to think of the inside of his buildings as streets, carefully controlled versions of the clamorous commercial thoroughfares of yore. Yet he always fails.

Jerde’s shopping malls remain closed-off, destructive monsters that suck all the life out of the neighborhoods around them and give only traffic back. In fact, you may wonder whether he doesn’t make matters worse by trying so hard to turn the honest experience of shopping into a Disneyland-like trip through many lands and many times that have been joined in a continual assault on the senses.

A case in point is the Westside Pavilion. In many ways, this is a traditional shopping mall: a long line of shops stretched between two anchor stores (in this case, a May Co. and a Nordstrom), closed off from the outside and governed by the need to maximize the visibility of the stores.

But the fact that the May Co. was already in place and that the site was both long and narrow and watched over by vigilant neighbors, gave Jerde the opportunity to break things down a bit. He stacked his stores three high under a barrel vault of a skylight. He then designed the resulting narrow space to present the feeling of walking through a galleria, one of those 19th-Century shopping streets the Europeans carved out of dense city blocks.

He broke the long wall of the building on Pico Boulevard down into a series of bays, each one sporting a different texture, color and pattern. He tried to make the whole building seem as though it had been made from smaller, more recognizable pieces. That concern shows even in the detailing of the escalators, whose workings are visible through glass panes.

Yet the Westside Pavilion is still huge, looming over its neighbors with its million square feet of space. It has destroyed the commercial viability of the once-vibrant shopping streets of Westwood. It has forced neighbors to cope with a continual snarl of traffic.

Once inside, the building resembles a three-dimensional string of commercials barely contained by the thin architectural elements that tie it together. Retail conventions forced Jerde to make circulation circumspect, so shoppers have to walk by hundreds of stores as they go from floor to floor. He then hides the two entrances to the street off to the side, so the whole experience becomes completely divorced from the outside.

The piece of the Westside Pavilion that works best is the rooftop parking. A ramp cuts through an existing parking garage and leads shoppers up to a kind of terrace from which they can survey the city before descending down into the vertiginous space stretched out on either side of them. One can only wish that this concrete aerie had been treated with the same design attention as was lavished on the commercial inside of the space.

A more recent addition has also made an urbanistic contribution: a massive, and in itself clumsily proportioned, bridge connects the pavilion to a small addition across Westwood Boulevard. This bridge acts as a gate leading in and out of Westwood.

The addition, by the way, is worse than the original. It uses what is becoming a Jerde signature, a curved walkway, to seduce you through the project, resulting in a strange fragment of bombast lost in a rectilinear building. At least it is open to the sky, so you can remember there is a world beyond such abominations.