Fantasies of a City High on a Hill

What to do with Jon Jerde? Since 1985, when he first hit the national stage with the completion of San Diego’s Horton Plaza--a hybrid shopping center and pedestrian “experience”--Jerde has been touted as an urban visionary by some and reviled as a slave to crass commercial interests by others.

Developers shower him with commissions in Asia, Europe and America. The architectural intelligentsia condemn his designs as theme-park kitsch. It is not just that Jerde designs malls--considered the most lowbrow of architectural commissions--that irritates the architects. It is that he has accomplished something most of them can only dream of. He has reached beyond the cultural elite to tap into the public imagination. And that public has flocked to his projects.

With a major expansion of Universal CityWalk, opening Thursday, Jerde pumps up the scale of his hybrid landscape and, in the process, updates it for the Information Age. Jerde’s design for the original CityWalk, a 2-block-long pedestrian “street” marked by a nostalgic mix of neon, billboards and mismatched architectural styles, sought to imbue a retail-and-entertainment complex with the chaotic energy of a real city. The expansion extends that pedestrian strip and decorates it with new technologies, including a video board, a giant light screen and a booming surround-sound audio system.

Like the original CityWalk, the expansion’s technologically driven pop landscape doesn’t aspire to the kind of social idealism and aesthetic purity that were the foundations of Modernism. Nor does it challenge the mind or the imagination, as great architecture should. These are coarse compositions, sometimes corny, invariably safe. Jerde’s work recalls the earlier visions of Walt Disney and Sid Grauman--buildings whose decorated surfaces primarily evoke the raw, uncensored fantasies of mass culture.

But Jerde can’t be easily dismissed as merely a hack designer of kitsch retail centers. He has a genuine knack for shaping public space. And if the mall has become America’s Grand Boulevard, the place where the middle class satisfies its voyeuristic urges, Jerde believes that it is also fast becoming the urban melting pot’s last stand. As Jerde puts it: “These things are vast consumption machines, but we treat them as communal complexes that happen to have shopping in them. What we provide is urban glue.”

But another way to look at this, of course, is that the communal component of Jerde’s formula is just another tool to ratchet up the level of consumption. CityWalk and its sequel can be read as a blunt commentary on contemporary America. It crystallizes a culture saturated by marketing, shaped by our growing obsession with escapist fantasy and our longing for social interaction.

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The mall was spun out of the ideals of postwar suburbia, with its myths of ever-expanding wealth and social tranquillity. The Los Angeles-based architecture firm Gruen Associates is credited with creating the prototype, Southdale Center, on the outskirts of Minneapolis in 1956--an entirely enclosed composition of box-like buildings with two levels of shops clustered around a central court. By the 1960s, clumsier versions of that model had become a fixture on the suburban landscape, and it wasn’t long before the formula infiltrated the urban core.

With its high degree of social control--its labyrinthine interiors sealed off from any surrounding context--the suburban mall was as radical an experiment in social engineering as anything the Modernists imagined. The aim was to trap the consumer in an endless cycle of consumption. But it was also a monument of suburban loneliness: an anonymous place to escape into a comforting community of shoppers.

The form of this new kind of shopping center was quickly challenged by more nostalgic models. In historically minded cities like San Francisco, the development of Ghirardelli Square in 1964 and the Cannery in 1968 was conceived as an antidote to the dull boxes of suburbia. There, retailers were plugged into existing historic brick buildings, welding them directly into the city’s existing fabric. The idea was to retain at least the ethos of an organic, pedestrian city.

But it took a city shaped by cars to embrace the mall as a legitimate subject for architectural experimentation. In L.A., the slick, playful, blue and green geometric forms of Cesar Pelli’s 1976 Pacific Design Center, a high-end retail complex for designers, pushed the aesthetics of the mall to a higher standard. In his 1980 design for Santa Monica Place, Frank Gehry sought to give the mall some formal complexity, cranking an angular stairway against the symmetrical grid of surrounding shops. But both projects, in their own way, were limited aesthetic investigations. They reflected the problems even talented architects faced when working in a rigidly defined commercial context. Neither challenged the mall’s fundamental configuration.

Jerde shakes up that formula by mixing in a variety of urban realities. The son of an oil-field construction supervisor, he claims to have been inspired early on by that muscular, industrial landscape. But his professional roots are more mundane. Trained in the office of Santa Monica-based Charles Kober and Associates, he spent a decade designing conventional suburban shopping centers before setting out on his own with the Horton Plaza commission.

Packed into six downtown blocks, the Horton Plaza design centers on a zigzagging open-air court that carves through the site like an urban alley. On either side, stores are stacked on two levels in mismatched forms meant to replicate the vibrancy of a real city.

That image was a lie of sorts. Despite tying into the urban grid on either end, Horton Plaza retains the critical features of the conventional mall: a tightly controlled space, armed with a host of security guards to screen out unwanted elements.

But to say that this is a sterilized world is at least in part to miss the point. Horton Plaza mostly seeks to attract visitors willing to spend their hard-earned cash, and in 1985, the year it opened, more than 25 million showed up, spending $18 million. And the project’s appeal to ordinary Americans was vast. Families, mall rats, locals and tourists, black, white, Latino--all rubbed shoulders in Jerde’s faux urban landscape.

By then, however, Jerde was thinking on a more gargantuan scale. Hired in 1985 by the Walt Disney Co., which was looking for ways to house the tourists that would one day be arriving at its new European theme park, Jerde set out to design an entirely self-contained entertainment-retail resort. Dubbed Satellite City, the development was disk-shaped, more than a mile in diameter, with 50 hotels, spas, a conference center, shopping and recreation zones. Two intersecting streets cut the site into four “neighborhoods.” Spiraling canals--spilling out of a massive aqueduct--served as a mock Venetian transportation system. Even high culture was part of the formula: Celebrated architects such as Richard Rogers (co-designer of Paris’ Pompidou Center), Mexico’s Ricardo Legorreta and the Miami-based Architectonica were slated to design landmark buildings.

Disney, perhaps overwhelmed, opted for a more conventional string of hotels. But Jerde’s plans suggest what he was getting at all along: a mall that swallowed a city whole.

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Conceptually, CityWalk fits somewhere in between Horton Plaza and the Disney project. Jerde was first hired in 1989 by then-head of Universal Lew Wasserman to develop a master plan for the entire 425-acre hilltop site. Jerde’s solution was to link Universal’s main attractions--theme park, amphitheater, cinema complex and parking--via a long retail spine, surrounded by a “community” of studios and office structures. But like Satellite City, this plan was scrapped--in the end, the pragmatic Wasserman only gave the go-ahead for a portion of the retail spine.

The result, CityWalk’s first phase, was a simulated Main Street for a region that famously has none. Jerde packed it with images distilled from Los Angeles’ own peculiar landscape of fantasy: a giant surfboard, a suspended Stratocaster, a wave machine in a small tiled pool meant to recall the sounds of the ocean. These decorative elements were applied to a knowing mix of architectural quotations, from Futurism to Postmodernism. The tough forms and occasional use of chain-link even evoke Gehry’s early work.

The new CityWalk extends that ersatz streetscape past the Universal Cineplex plaza in a loop around the Hard Rock Cafe. Set on two levels, the new structures offer fewer architectural quotations, leaning toward a more abstract aesthetic. At one end, an opening leads into a small open-air arena, which Universal plans to use for ice skating, skateboarding and small music events. The second level--made up mostly of food courts--is anchored by a semicircular terrace across from the main cinema and tops the loop’s southern elevation.

Jerde’s mastery of the language of pop culture is at full force here. The cineplex’s facade has been painted shocking blue, with a projection of the Universal logo that will sweep back and forth across its facade and down onto the court. A video board hovers over the plaza, flashing images of bands or the crowds milling around below. And a towering 45-foot-tall screen-wall wraps around the entire street, with billboards popping out of its surface and light shows projected onto it from behind. The effect is a “Blade Runner”-like collage of commercial images, a tensely energetic mix of fantasy and reality.

By making powerful visual connections between CityWalk’s audience and the complex’s various events, and by suggesting the existence of a city that extends beyond CityWalk’s edges, that fantasy of urbanity only increases in power. The looping route around the Hard Rock Cafe, for instance, reinforces the illusion of a sprawling cityscape; asymmetrical store entrances and tucked-away parking-lot entries evoke the alleyways and crooked streets that make real cities places of endless, sudden discovery. And, as at Horton Plaza and the original CityWalk, the complex should attract the kind of mix of ethnic, class and age groups that defines the urban experience.

But it is the aspects of the city that CityWalk seeks to preempt--not what it provides--that should make us uneasy. A safe, enveloping environment bombarded with sound and images takes the place of genuine cultural exchange. Themed events and global brands pose as real, living subcultures; fake references replace the accumulated memories of a real city. To sit down and watch this city unfold, you have to pay first--for parking, food or entertainment. It is a world in which genuine experience has been supplanted by the need to consume.

To many, these objections will smack of intellectual snobbism. Cities, after all, have always been places of social engineering: Downtown Los Angeles, in its current incarnation, exists as two carefully segregated worlds, with high culture arrayed atop Bunker Hill and low culture on Broadway below. CityWalk is simply another fantasy about the city, one that places its own limits on who can take part in that community. What’s more, CityWalk’s Information Age gimmickry only makes the fact that it is a manufactured world more obvious.

The truth is that CityWalk is only a symptom of a relentless global phenomenon. The distinctions between civic and commercial realms are blurring. Any activity is seen as a means of generating profit. If CityWalk is a model for the future, it is a model that tells us that, as a civic culture, we are exchanging the realities of urban life for a fantasy.