talking the walk

This Thursday, CityWalk will open its second phase of development, which dispenses with the juxtaposed facades of Phase One and uses lighting as a signature architectural component. Designed by architect Jon Jerde, it features such fresh attractions as Versailles’ garlic chicken and a “rock-’n’-roll bowling alley.” We spoke to Jerde about the need to create leisure-oriented public places that also make money for the people who build them.

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How does one distill Los Angeles into a single, albeit expanded, block?

CityWalk had to be appropriately built on the architectural language of L.A., as opposed to New York or Paris. And the language of L.A. is that there is no language except stucco buildings and layers put upon them. So the thematic element is layering.

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CityWalk seems less like los angeles in its banishment of cars and its throngs of pedestrians.

I saw CityWalk as a venue for human intercourse. All America is now private except for profit centers. New York and San Francisco held on to more foot-driven aspects of human interaction, but most of the country has been given over to separateness and loneliness. And we try to reduce that in almost everything we do.

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And yet, CityWalk itself was built primarily as a center of profit.

Our trick device was to sneak all of our value systems in there, to focus on human interaction. When I won a traveling fellowship from USC’s architecture school, I went to places where people got communal--Italian hill towns, town squares. I found that communality was the big payoff in life. So I went home drunk with this huge dictionary of communal things, and got back to this dead America and said, “Gee, I have to do the same things here.” And the only place to do that was the shopping center. I don’t like to shop much, but I said, “So be it: I’ll start with shopping centers.”

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Hilltop towns in Tuscany and North Beach in San Francisco were able to grow organically. Do you anticipate that future communal spaces will have to be self-consciously designed, like citywalk?

Sadly, yes, because of the huge change in time frame. You used to have at least 100 years for a thing to evolve into a mature and complex version of itself. Now you do not. Rome may have had 5 million people, and they had 500 years to develop that. Now, at Namba, the park project we’re designing in Osaka, I am also creating an environment for 5 million. I can’t create history because I don’t have 500 years, but I can create a “place.”

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How do you keep the seams of your self-conscious creations from showing?

Our enemies are artifice and the ersatz [with] fake this and fake that, like those theme restaurants. But people reject it. It’s exceedingly difficult to make sure that what you do isn’t exceedingly synthetic and contrived.

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What kind of progress has citywalk made into the lexicon?

People now use the word CityWalk as a verb. To “citywalk” something is to bring life, light and animation into something that is otherwise dead. “Citywalking” is now something you do to a place.

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CityWalking

An incomplete list of L.A. attractions that Jon Jerde finds in need of “CityWalking”:

*”All the missions.”

*”All the studios.”

*”Every parking lot.”

*”Watts Towers. The lighting isn’t bad, but now it’s a gigantic surprise to come across the towers. You could set up a procession from the parked car, and make this approach a pedestrian event, with a history of Simon Rodia, like they do with Gaud 3/8 in Barcelona.”

*”Around the corner from any shop in Chinatown, Olvera Street or Little Tokyo, where the lights go out and it becomes empty of people.”