Father of the Mini-Mall Takes Pride in Offspring

In the movie “Defending Your Life,” the protagonist played by Albert Brooks has died and gone to a place called Judgment City.

But even in the afterlife, there is one facet of his life in Los Angeles that Brooks can’t escape: the mini-mall.

“Six of them just opened outside of town,” a cheery Judgment City functionary tells the bewildered Brooks. “Personally, I don’t think I would use them because I don’t like yogurt and I love doing my own nails.”

Real-life Los Angeles architect Tom Layman could only laugh recently when he saw the movie, just the latest in more than a decade of raspberries for the small, corner shopping centers that he helped make popular.

Since 1978, Layman and his Van Nuys architectural firm, T.W. Layman Associates, have designed an estimated 300 of the centers. That makes him one of the foremost interpreters of the building form that has remade--some would say scarred--the face of Los Angeles.

City planners, architectural critics, even movie makers, take their potshots at mini-malls, but Layman defends them with equanimity. He says the centers--with their ubiquitous yogurt shops, dry cleaners and nail parlors--are a sensible adaptation to the fast-paced life in Los Angeles.

By now, most Angelenos can identify a mini-mall: the standard corner locale, the cluster of shops, the small parking lot in front and the plethora of signs.

Critics complain that the centers pander to the native car culture and discourage walking in a city that has already found too many reasons not to get out from behind the wheel. In the process, the naysayers charge, “pod malls” have snarled traffic, attracted loiterers, presented a new canvas for graffiti and generally blighted Los Angeles.

Although Layman has received kudos for several of his centers, including a commendation from the San Fernando Valley chapter of the American Institute of Architects, neighbors are not always as pleased. Take Betty Newman of Pacific Palisades, who lost a battle a few years ago to keep a Layman-designed mini-mall out of her neighborhood. “It’s fairly inconspicuous now,” Newman said. “That is the best thing I can say about it.”

Although critics can be emotional, even vitriolic, Layman, 47, is not one to get excited. He talks about his work in the bottom line terminology of a man who once sold commercial real estate. He is catering to a market and making a living.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s “space was running out in the city for small retailers,” Layman said. “At the same time, gas stations were closing, and opening up land. This offered an opportunity to come into the already developed urban environment and carve out a niche where you could juxtapose a building with parking.”

And there was demand: “Demands on our time were becoming much more severe. People were willing to go to a small center and pay a little more for the convenience.”

Layman opened his architectural firm in 1978, with a staff of four, and soon designed his first mini-mall on Pacific Coast Highway in Lomita. By the mid-1980s, he and a staff of more than 20 were planning more than 50 centers a year for clients around Southern California.

The architect has expanded into other fields, designing larger retail centers and some office buildings. He said he even occasionally lets his hair down with “a cartoon,” a bit of architectural whimsy, such as the two office buildings he planned in the style of Victorian homes.

But Layman said he was not looking for fame or immortality in the design world when he found his mainstay, the mini-mall. And he shrugs off all of the barbs and jokes.

“If I was going to have an architectural firm and be competitive--to have business in good times as well as bad--I knew I had to find a niche that wasn’t already taken up by a lot of other people. I chose smaller retail tenants.”

Layman said he has “not gotten rich” off mini-malls, but he has made a comfortable living for his family. He is married, has two children and has lived in the same house in Woodland Hills for nearly 20 years.

Touring the San Fernando Valley in his black convertible Porsche 911, Layman said mini-mall developers are intent on building functional structures, not elaborate and costly designs “just to gratify their own egos.”

He concedes that it is “challenging, very challenging,” but feels his firm has introduced variety into its mini-malls. He said some features can almost never be changed: parking must be in front, windows must be expansive and hardly broken by structural devices, signs must be easy to read. Developers and retailers insist on these features, Layman said, because they help lure shoppers off the street.

But the architect said he has managed to use different building materials, an array of colors and other variations to bring “a little more sophistication to a building type that didn’t have a lot of pizazz.”

Mini-malls “are not as glamorous as a tall office building and they may not be as glamorous as a home,” Layman said, “but I don’t think you can lump them all together and say they are all ugly because of the architecture.”

The Midwest native, who received his bachelor’s degree in architecture from Idaho State University, said critics are often upset about problems that are beyond an architect’s control.

Layman finds some irony, too, in Angelenos who are nostalgic for the often mundane commercial thoroughfares or for the gas stations that mini-malls replaced. “Those aren’t usually considered too aesthetically pleasing, are they?” he asked.

“We take a lot of pride in what we are doing.”