Shopping Mall Parking Garage

* I’ve lived in Ventura for 10 years, and there’s a lot to like about this town. There are also a number of things that puzzle me.

One of them is the parking garage at Pacific View Mall. It’s the wrong building in the wrong place. Something this homely should have been located elsewhere or camouflaged.

OK, it isn’t the Louvre or the Guggenheim or the Getty. It’s a parking garage. It adheres to the dictates of function at the expense of expression of form. By definition, we must forgive a parking garage if it is not pleasing to the eye. However, that is no reason something so unsightly should be put on display, running parallel to a main thoroughfare, as though it were a real building.

Like a lung or liver, furnace or fuse box, the parking garage is best when it performs its function inconspicuously. Surely the mall designers and city planners never meant to leave this garage, the mall’s most prominent projection, encroaching [on] Mills Road like a utility shed.

For the same reasons that lanky people shouldn’t wear vertical stripes, or fat folks horizontal ones, shopping malls like Pacific View should not leave Erector Set projects out on the street.

I tell myself they intended to build it underground. Or if underground was too expensive, they meant to build it around the back. Or if around the back is too far for a serious shopper to walk, [that] they meant to put it . . . . I find myself creating all kinds of excuses for why this eyesore is where it is. But I don’t like any of them.

They spent $90 million redressing the mall and forgot to wash its face.

PETER KURPASKA

Ventura