A Period Pastiche

The era of Art Deco was ripe for American architecture. The best buildings from the period, which peaked during the 1920s and ‘30s, combined elegant decoration with bold, modern forms. Examples of public edifices from the period include the main library in Los Angeles (designed by Bertram Goodhue) and the County Administration Center in San Diego (Louis Gill, William T. Johnson, Richard Requa, Sam Hamill).

Those years also spawned striking buildings dedicated to commerce in Chicago, New York--notably the Chrysler Building--and Los Angeles--where Bullock’s Wilshire, designed by John and Donald Parkinson and opened in 1929, remains a landmark.

San Diego developers Walter Smyk and Steven Davis pay homage to the latter tradition of consumer-oriented Deco with the Paladion, a new chi-chi downtown mall, designed by the Nadel Partnership of Los Angeles.

Smyk’s and Davis’ $34-million, 115,000-square-foot project, located between 1st Avenue and Front Street downtown, just west of Horton Plaza shopping center, opens Saturday. Elite boutiques such as Tiffany, Salvatore Ferragamo, Mark Cross, Cartier and Gucci anchor the ground floor.

The building’s overall profile is striking and well-proportioned. In a downtown lacking in stately, low-rise buildings, the Paladion fills the void with a sophisticated, understated exterior.

Expensively detailed storefronts installed by anchor tenants are not faithful to the Art Deco style, but they don’t dominate, and they lend an appropriate air of quality. Here is a timeless building that will still look good in 20 or 30 years, when critics see Horton Plaza as a trendy, outdated period piece.

But the Paladion disappoints, too. Exterior decoration is not as beautiful or intriguing as on the best buildings of the original Deco era, many of which boasted intricately hand-carved stone friezes, colorful ceramic tile and Egyptian-inspired motifs.

Worst of all, the Paladion’s interior is a cacophony of forms and materials, amplified to dizzying effect by mirror-like bronze paneling that rings the open-air, four-story atrium lobby at the heart of the project. Rooftop offices for developer Davis are bleak, dark-glass boxes. They crown the project with a jarring 1980s, spec-development touch.

Many original Deco buildings were laid out according to a strong symmetry, and the Paladion follows their lead. The building takes the form of a square, bisected by a central pedestrian path that connects main entrances on 1st and Front with an open-air octagonal atrium called Ivy Court, at the center of the building.

Main entrances are marked by towers that rise above the three-story facades and project forward as three-sided bays. Corner store entrances are also indicated by towers.

Exterior off-white walls are defined by banks of multi-paned windows and fluted green precast panels. Vertical pilasters separate these vertical groupings of windows. Together, such details create pleasing proportions and rhythms.

At the street level, the design of individual storefronts departs from the pseudo-Deco detailing of the Paladion’s upper walls.

The facade of Tiffany’s, for example, is stolid, relatively flat, classically proportioned, adorned with 12-foot-high stainless steel entry doors that cost $35,000 apiece.

Gucci’s classically vaulted entry at First Avenue and G Street, lined with exotic African hardwood called anegre, is modeled after the original Gucci store in Rome.

Awnings in front of most stores and eye-level display windows add human scale to the Paladion.

From within the Ivy Court, shoppers look up through this open atrium space to catch glimpses of interior storefronts, sky and a fabric Teflon-fiberglass roof that allows copious natural light inside.

To help lure shoppers up through this space, since multilevel retailing is considered risky by marketing experts, the developers situated their Bice Restaurant and women’s Spa De La Mar on the roof. Three levels of escalators ferry shoppers upward, in full view of the lobby, providing an ever-changing spectacle for people-watchers.

Shopping at the Paladion will be a new experience downtown. Underground parking is by valet. For sheer richness, the Ivy Court matches some of the world’s best hotels, with generous expanses of granite, marble, custom carpeting and fine woods.

But interior designer J. M. Von Graven has used these materials to strangling effect, especially in the Ivy Court, where materials and colors clash: greenish granite table tops next to striped fabric in autumnal hues next to olive sofas.

Most jarring of all is the glitzy bronze paneling used between floors and on vertical columns within the Ivy Court atrium.

Architect Jerry Allmand of Nadel said the intent was for the paneling to serve as a neutral “foil” for the interior storefronts. But the effect is quite the opposite. The shiny metal reflects everything in sight. It’s as if several giant, disorienting abstract paintings were suspended in this central space.

The Paladion’s most visible art works are in the Art Nouveau style, as is commonly found on Deco buildings. This 1890s art movement emphasized sensuousness, female figures and fecund, suggestive plant forms.

Friezes over main entrances on Front and First depict Art Nouveau-style muses. Instead of the bronze used in the classic buildings, though, these were cast of bronze-coated fiberglass, and were designed by Los Angeles artist Richard Ellis. They were inspired by a pair of muses Smyk spied on a pair of elevator doors in a turn-of-the-century East Coast building.

Poised over the octagonal bar in the Ivy Court is a statue of a comely maiden, “Alice, Nymph of the Valley,” modeled on an 1890s work by the Italian sculptor Pittaluga.

Given the building’s lofty ambitions, it is a disappointment not to find any original contemporary artworks at the Paladion. The site for the “Alice” statue, in particular, could have been used for a real showpiece.

All told, the Paladion, a contemporary Deco knockoff diluted by eclectic influences, is no equal to the great Deco masterpieces, nor does it make a satisfying statement of its own.

Due to the high cost of materials, the architects couldn’t fully duplicate the romance of authentic Art Deco. For example, they settled for an exterior of precast, stucco-like material instead of the limestone they originally wanted.

The Paladion has neither the grandeur of the Bullock’s Wilshire, with its tall, elegant spire, nor the vibrant consumer symbolism of the Chrysler building, with its giant decorations of assorted automobile parts.

The most interesting thing about the Paladion is its fabric roof. Maybe the Paladion’s potential market of upscale shoppers doesn’t care for original, 1990s architecture. Most other San Diego developers make parallel arguments, whether they are building for middle-income apartment tenants, well-heeled shoppers who might visit phony Mediterranean malls or home buyers who might purchase bad, imitation Mediterranean or Cape Cod houses.

In a downtown that has few well-designed, major contemporary buildings--among them Canadian architect Arthur Erickson’s San Diego Convention Center and Chicago architect Helmut Jahn’s America Plaza--it would be refreshing for a developer to take a chance on something new and original, instead of a period pastiche.