A Mall Master Takes On the World

Yoshiko Hirayama has been freed from her “life as a mole.” She couldn’t be happier.

After years of toiling in crowded department stores brightened only by artificial light, “I can smile naturally, can enjoy myself, and that is passed on to the customers,” said the manager of the Cue’ss International Network boutique.

Her new home opens out into the heart of Canal City Hakata, a $1.4-billion shopping and entertainment complex designed by a Southern California architect whose popular, controversial, Hollywood-inspired designs suddenly are cropping up all over the planet, particularly in fast-growing Asian economies.

From a beachfront office in Venice, Jon Jerde immodestly proposes to reshape the way people view the urban community, breaking down the walls between cultures and between entertainment and shopping, pleasure and profit, the viewers and the viewed.

Among the architect’s best-known projects is Universal CityWalk, the $100-million complex next to Universal Studios. After its completion in 1993, the project--which incorporates bits of L.A. Art Deco and Las Vegas glitz in a pedestrian-friendly promenade--sparked a lively debate over the future of America’s languishing urban neighborhoods.

One architecture critic called it an “imaginative first step on the road toward reinventing the incoherent and often inhospitable metropolis,” while others felt it foreshadowed the privatization of public spaces and swallowed millions of dollars at the expense of true city neighborhoods.

CityWalk is to L.A., another critic wrote, as a petting zoo is to nature.

Now, Jerde is exporting his award-winning vision--and the debate--overseas. The issues raised by such projects are of particular concern in Asia, where historic preservation gets little more than lip service from leaders more concerned with boosting economic growth and maintaining order than with saving granite or promoting the democracy of public plazas.

Canal City Hakata, which opened in April, is just the first of many “third-millennium” cities dedicated to Jerde’s view that the world’s greatest cities can be saved through an infusion of fantasy and fun that is not bounded by culture or national origin.

Through his savvy packaging of Hollywood-inspired entertainment, retail and restaurants, he has become a guru of a form of architecture known as entertainment design. In his world, eating or shopping becomes a theatrical experience.

By tearing down the walls between celluloid and reality, Jerde appeals to the huge appetite for Hollywood glamour that has made American films and music among the United States’ most profitable, and influential, exports.

Jerde projects are on the drawing board or under construction in a dozen spots, including Shanghai; Tokyo; Manila; Beijing; Seoul; Rotterdam, the Netherlands; and the Gold Coast of Australia. Imitators abound, promising a glut of look-alike developments featuring theme restaurants, movie complexes and shops packaged in neon and high-tech glitz.

Profitable Vision

Since it opened, the Canal City project--about twice the size of San Diego’s Horton Plaza, another Jerde creation--has attracted 4.5 million visitors, a testament to his powerful and profitable vision of urban life.

Rising above the neighboring industrial buildings and shops of Fukuoka, a port on the north coast of Kyushu, Japan’s southernmost main island, Canal City Hakata is a fanciful parody of Arizona desert cliff dwellings.

A man-made canal featuring randomly spouting geysers of sparkling clear water--obviously not from the mud-brown canals of the surrounding neighborhood--winds through a canyon of colorful enameled metal, porcelain and mosaic tile and stone.

Along one side are layers of trendy boutiques, restaurants and entertainment facilities, including Japan’s biggest movie theater complex. Across the canal, the urban milieu fractures into a thousand glistening pieces in the glass wall of the Grand Hyatt Fukuoka hotel.

Turn the corner here, and you are tempted by a dazzling display of DKNY dresses and Louis Vuitton handbags. Step up the escalator and stumble into a high-tech entertainment zone from the creators of the Sega game machines. Off to the right, a row of geysers unexpectedly erupts, sending a nearby crowd into a spasm of laughter.

Capturing the zeitgeist, Jerde calls it.

“Design for me is not a noun, stolid and declarative, as in entertainment design,” he writes in a soon-to-be-published tome, “Urban Entertainment Graphics.” “It is a verb, mercurial and creative, as in the design of spaces and places for human enlightenment and yes, entertainment. Simply put, we are placemakers trying to lend a project a heart and soul.”

But grand ambition rarely escapes unscathed, and Jerde is no exception.

“The impact of this project is very big, but it doesn’t solve the urban problems which belong to Tokyo or Fukuoka,” said Toshiro Sato, a Japanese environmental designer. “That was the challenge for Jon Jerde in America, and now he has brought this problem to Japan.”

Decline of Public Space

Naysayers fear the proliferation of these giant entertainment complexes--which significantly up the ante from the suburban shopping mall--will accelerate the decline of the world’s plazas and parks, leaving behind a swath of pseudo-cities for future anthropologists to unearth.

They argue that Jerde’s idealized vision of 21st century public space will widen the divide between haves and have-nots by creating barriers--like parking fees and security guards--that screen out the poor, the crime, the graffiti and other evidence of reality.

In his book, “Variations on a Theme Park,” architect and critic Michael Sorkin describes this trend as an “architecture of deception” that has the potential to “irretrievably alter the character of cities as the preeminent sites of democracy and pleasure.”

As cash-strapped governments cut back on funding for parks and other community facilities, turning instead to private developers to resurrect their inner-city neighborhoods, the life of the world’s largest cities may become safer but, some fear, far less authentic and interesting.

Asia may be Exhibit A.

There, “you’re watching a conflation of ‘50s modernist bulldozing with ‘90s scripting and fantasy space,” said Norman Klein, a professor of critical studies at the California Institute of the Arts who is writing a book on the history of simulated environments. “There’s not going to be a lot left in many of these cities.”

As a man who has spent a lifetime turning dreams into tile and mortar, Jerde appears to have an answer to almost everything. But he admits that, at times, even he has questioned the wisdom of what some have described as a new form of American cultural imperialism that spread Hollywood’s values throughout the world.

“I’ve thought a lot about this,” he said. “What in the hell is relevant about a guy who lives in Venice going to Fukuoka to tell them how to live? But I’ve finally decided that there is no such thing anymore as the Fukuoka way, the old-fashioned way.”

Just a few blocks from the entrance to Canal City is Kamikawabata, one of Fukuoka’s oldest shopping streets. It has its own stores, restaurants and canal.

But rather than Norma Kamali, Chanel and Eddie Bauer, the crowded shops in the district have sold brands that few Americans--or Japanese for that matter--would recognize. And the canal is a dirty body of water that hugs the backside of the shops, a utilitarian vehicle for sewage and garbage.

Glimpse of the Past

It is here that one can glimpse an earlier time, when Fukuoka served as an entryway to Japan for traders from China and Korea. Although no longer a major trading port, the city remains a retail and tourism hub for Kyushu and Asian neighbors.

After World War II, Kamikawabata’s proximity to Fukuoka’s main rail station and several major temples made it a regular stop for shoppers and worshipers. Cheap land and prime location attracted butsudan, the shops selling the wooden Buddhist temples that still are kept in many homes.

But the neighborhood’s fortunes plunged in 1964, after the rail station moved several miles away to Tenjin, which became the city’s premier shopping district, attracting the major Japanese department stores and trendy boutiques.

When the news first leaked out in the mid-1970s that local developer Kazuku Enomoto was buying up industrial land to build a large mall nearby, the merchants of Kamikawabata began to worry. They feared that “canal gensho,” or canal phenomenon, would be their death, drawing away the few customers who still wandered down their street.

It was 1993 before Enomoto, Fukuoka’s largest developer, could nail down the financing for his project. In the interim, Japan’s consumers had become increasingly worldly. Thus he felt he needed something flashy and innovative to grab their attention.

Previous collaborations had convinced Enomoto that the most interesting molders of modern cities lived abroad. “In Japan, architects are not artists, they are engineers,” he said. “They can design one building, but if you get into a huge project, they cannot fit all the pieces together.”

Jerde Partnership International Inc. got a call from Enomoto after he paid a visit to Horton Plaza, a project that turned a decaying downtown neighborhood into one of San Diego’s hottest retailing sites when it opened in 1985.

Enomoto also sought out foreign merchants to give his project a distinctive international flavor. His timing was right. U.S. retailers were hankering to get into Japan, given the drop in the dollar and the plunge in real estate prices.

Many of Canal City’s U.S. tenants--which include Eddie Bauer, L.L. Bean, North Face and Sees Candies--had built up a loyal Japanese following through mail order. Foreign companies make up nearly half of the project’s 120 tenants.

Belying pessimists’ warnings, by the time Canal City Hakata opened, its neighbors in Kamikawabata had embraced the enemy, affording customers not just a glimpse of the past, but of the future. Shopkeepers had repainted their facades and, in some cases, replaced old inventory with upscale merchandise. A long line of colorful banners lined the street, proclaiming the happy marriage of the new and the old.

Even the dirty old canal had undergone a face lift, inspiring restaurant owner Hiroyuki Tanaka to turn a beauty shop into an art gallery featuring an espresso bar with canal-side dining. And a pedestrian walkway to Canal City turned out to be the path to retailer’s heaven. During Golden Week in April, Japan’s biggest holiday, more than 60,000 people a day strolled through Kamikawabata to or from Canal City.

“This is very unusual in Japan--where the construction of a new project revives the old shopping area,” said Masaki Keitaro, a Kamikawabata shop owner.

Promoters of Canal City and Kamikawabata have turned this to their advantage, developing a marketing campaign that offers their neighborhood as a unique window into Japan’s future and its past.

But as its temple shops are replaced by upscale boutiques and old people’s apartments become waterfront cafes, will the history that Kamikawabata represents survive as anything more than a marketing extravaganza? And what of the old-timers who frequented those tiny shops and hung their laundry along the canal?

Designer Sato, who remains a fan of Jerde’s designs, fears cities such as Fukuoka--in the rush to modernize their aging infrastructure--are abdicating their traditional responsibilities for providing public space, shifting the task to private developers answerable only to their investors. In such a situation, he argues, no one speaks for those who don’t need, or can’t afford, $200 hiking boots.

Simple Socializing

One common complaint about Canal City is the lack of places to sit. That keeps traffic moving, cuts down on loitering and encourages weary shoppers to visit one of the many restaurants. But along with the parking fees and guards, it discourages people who simply are interested in an afternoon of sunshine and socializing.

“Generally speaking, in cities, the business space is more and more improved and the public space is being lost,” Sato said. He also fears that by acting as a magnet for the wealthy and young, Canal City will suck the life out of other parts of Fukuoka unless city officials are watchful. Canal gensho is taking a toll: Since Canal City opened, business in other major Fukuoka shopping areas has dropped 20% to 30%.

In Jerde’s mind, the critical choices facing 21st century cities are not between Los Angeles style or Fukuoka style, East or West, modern or old. They are between livable and unlivable, fun and frightening, comfortable and cold.

He argues that his third-millennium cities are not a repudiation of the past but an attempt to replicate the feeling and energy of the world’s most beloved urban spaces, from the historic Bund in Shanghai to the Left Bank in Paris to Rome’s Piazza di Spagna.

“Visceral is the word I use to describe our architecture,” he said. “We do design buildings. But we do it in the service of inventing a place.”

It is far too early to know whether the third-millennium city will enter the architectural history books as a late 20th century innovation.

Likewise, it is too soon to declare Canal City a box-office success. But so far, it looks as if shoppers and fun-seekers have few doubts. It rang up $48 million in sales in its first month of operation--exceeding projections by 140%.

And a live production of “The Phantom of the Opera,” which is playing at the complex’s Fukuoka City Theater, is sold out for four months.

Makiko Inoue of the Times’ Tokyo Bureau contributed to this article.

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Profile:

Jon Adams Jerde

* Born: Jan. 22, 1940, Alton, Ill.

* Education: Bachelor of arts degree in architecture, USC, 1964

* Company: Jerde Partnership International, an 85-member urban planning and architecture firm based in Venice. Billings in 1995: $15 million.

* Major projects: 1984 Los Angeles Olympics; Horton Plaza in downtown San Diego; Universal CityWalk; Fremont Street in Las Vegas; Mall of America in Bloomington, Minn.; Fashion Island at Newport Center, Newport Beach.

* Major awards: Magazine of International Design 1985 Annual Design Award, 1985 Distinguished Alumnus Award from USC’s School of Architecture, 1991 Urban Land Institute Award, 1991 Progressive Architecture Award, 1994 International Council of Shopping Centers Design Award, 1994 Urban Beautification Award from the Los Angeles Business Council.

Professional memberships: American Institute of Architects, Urban Land Institute, International Council of Shopping Centers and the Architectural Guild at USC.

* Defining experience: A three-month travel fellowship to Europe from the American Institute of Architects in 1964, during which he fell in love with the hill towns of Tuscany.

* Intellectual mentors: Science-fiction writer Ray Bradbury, former Disney art director John DeCuir, architects Paolo Solari and Louis Kahn.

* Personal: Married with five children, lives in Venice.

* Hobbies: Painting and sculpting