Peter Sargent
Whatever your architectural tastes you should find something to appeal to them in the Horton Plaza, San Diego’s unusual downtown shopping development which opened two years ago.
The New York Times has described it as a “conventional shopping mall on a stage-set for an Italian hill town”. Turrets, colonnades, terraces, towers and a surprising, imposing staircase all echo, to American eyes anyway, the streets of Europe.
It even has, remarked that newspaper, “a kind of central tower, an abstract version of the cathedral in Sienna, to act as a focal point on the main plaza”. One department store appears as Palladio’s basilica in Vincenza, another with the towers of the Santa Fe railroad depot in miniature. There are adaptations of a Bolognese arcade, a New Mexican Indian pueblo and an English crescent.
Into this hotch potch are thrown other styles, a take-off of the Art Moderne theatres of the 1930s, a restaurant looking like a 1950s American diner, Legoland structures and gorgeous shop fronts inspired by Disneyland. Indeed, it could be the fantasy-based architecture of Charles Moore who, 20 years ago, wrote so enthusiastically about Walt Disney to the consternation of the formal-minded.
The link with Disney is definitely present in the philosophy of the Horton Plaza design. Disney learned his “architecture” from the techniques he and others had to develop for film-making. If they had to shoot a scene of “Main Street” they had to consider every angle as seen from the camera as it moved down the street following the action. This explains the architectural success of Main Street in Disneyland; what is so different about moving down the street with a camera — or walking?
And walking is what you have to do in Horton Plaza. Cars cannot enter. The narrow streets twist and turn, walkways and escalators take you to different levels in what is an adventure of sight, sound and smell. Always there are new views, new places to explore, surprises.
A quotation from The Art of Walt Disney expresses the Disney philosophy of design:
A great film or play may broaden the horizons of thousands of people, introducing them to fresh ideas or deepening their understanding of the human condition. The Disney Parks have a very different goal. They are designed to satisfy the existing imaginative appetites of tens of millions of men, women and children.
If you add to “a great film or play”, the words “a great piece of architecture” then the same applies to design, and the Horton Plaza is the shopping equivalent of the leisure park — “popular” architecture for the enjoyment of the masses. Different international styles of the present have been brought together for the everyday enjoyment of San Diegans. The architect, Jon Jerde, even reproduced two of the buildings that had to be razed to the ground in developing the site.
Horton Plaza is not a leisure park, of course, but it brings to shopping the thinking of that genre, some of its fantasy and whimsy, into urban life. In today’s commercial world those qualities are more respected as profitable for an urban environment than they have ever been.
Millions of people enjoying Horton Plaza is not an overstatement: 200,000 people passed through on the opening three days in late 1986.
San Diego is California’s second largest city (America’s eighth) with a metropolitan population of over 1.8m out of the state’s 23m people. Horton Plaza is part of a project by San Diego’s Centre City Development Corporation (CCDC) which will progress steadily into the next century.
The project is the renaissance of downtown San Diego with, eventually, £3bn being spent on hotels, retail centres, high-rise offices, marinas, residential and recreational activities, a light-rail trolley system, theatres and restaurants. A convention centre will attract 300,000 to 400,000 tourists every year.
Love affair
Shopping centre developer Ernest Hahn began his love affair with Horton Plaza in 1973, two years before CCDC was created, when he was persuaded to bid for a much larger site. Dozens of blocks south of San Diego’s main street — Broadway — were dilapidated, right down to the harbour a mile away. Surface parking lots, old warehouses and boarded-up buildings abounded. Transients and vagrants frequented the area. All was social and economic blight, and deterioration.
Ernest Hahn Inc already owned some 40 regional shopping centres in eight western states, as well as in Texas, Iowa, North Carolina, Virginia and Tennessee.
Despite the dilapidation downtown, San Diego as a whole did not have the social problems of towns like Newark, Cincinnati, Cleveland or Detroit. What it does have is an almost perfect climate, beaches, a natural harbour, a pleasant lifestyle and numerous vacation attractions. It has Sea World, a zoo, two parks, a cultural heart, museums, a Shakespeare theatre, the man-made Shelter and Harbour Islands, golf, sailing, wind-surfing, deep sea fishing, swimming, cycling, tennis and one of the oldest and most pleasant Victorian beach hotels in the world, the Hotel Del Coronado. For an added dimension it is near Tijuana and the Mexican border. Finally, its city fathers were bent on a renaissance. Horton Plaza, although the “pilot light”, was only one of three projects over 300 available acres.
It is remarkable, however, that Ernest Hahn had the tenacity to persevere. The energy crisis came along. Proposition 13, a change in the city’s financial rules, was introduced and proved a heavy set-back. The deal had to be restructured with half as much tax revenue, on a smaller scale and with a more cautious design. During the recession (1980-1983) Mr Hahn had to underwrite bonds marketed by the city to acquire the last parcels of land.
In 1977 the plans were for a 563,000-sq ft leasable project spanning nine city blocks — as against the 6 1/2 blocks covering 11 1/2 acres finally made possible.
By 1981 the prime rate had broken 20% and it was harder to make the numbers work. The land had all been purchased but the city was not able to raise the money for the parking structure. In the end a complicated funding programme was arranged and Ernest Hahn invested $140m.
The standard shopping centre had a roof. But it was evident that a standard shopping centre would not do. To attract the urban shopper downtown inspiration was needed — so Mr Hahn hired Jon Jerde. He saw Horton Plaza as a “moment of architecture that will be a 100-year festival”. He took the roof off. This in itself opened up numerous design possibilities, not least in the colours of the environment. A sky so often blue could, as the ceiling to the Plaza, take a wholly different colour combination to the dull indoors. In the end, Jerde used the environmental designers Deborah Sussman and Paul Prejza, who had created that intense colour scheme for the Los Angeles Olympics. They devised a sequence of pastel shades, a palette of 28 colours — 13 blues, four reds, seven coral/yellows, and four mauve violets.
Horton Plaza was broken up into 10 different districts — each with its own colours, type of signage, style (canopies, neon signs, graphics) so that the shopping centre would seem to have been built over 20 years or so.
Design criteria for tenants
Jerde’s thinking can be seen in the design criteria laid down for tenants. The Esplanade was to have the polish, detail and elegance of urban retail. The storefronts in Columbus Tower were to use marble and granites, and polished metals to create a historical feeling, while in The Colonnade they were to be themed, carved or sculpted and used with creative ornamentation.
Restaurant Row (the food court) had to have individual buildings expressing their own architectural character up to and beyond the roof parapet.
On the North Terrace there was to be a coordinated theme of uniquely shaped store-front openings. Tenants on the level where there was a major entertainment complex had to “put on a show business hat” when designing storefronts, conveying a dramatic and exciting presence.
In the Palazzo, stores needed a rich but conservative look to counterpoint the highly articulated facade of the Palazzo building, whereas on South Terrace they were to express “a casual Southern Californian attitude and image through bright colours and large glazed openings”.
Chelsea Court was to be reminiscent of “an Old English townscape” and have “a strong sense of permanence and a high degree of tradition”. In contrast to this the shops in the Mercado sector would express the functional design character of an industrial district “multi-paned windows and doors with painted industrial sash and large openings with ornamental doors that fold, slide or roll up”.
In short, Horton Plaza was to be a city within a city, and the individual design contributions of the retailers were not only to create their own image unique to the scheme but also to help establish the character of their district.
Horton was to be an instant place that pretended to have grown up over time like towns that develop their garment district, financial district, or restaurant district. Those same influences, the tenants were told, “affect the artistic thought of the day, resulting in distinctive architectural styles that may also characterise the district . . . joining the activities and districts together will be walkways, bridges, ramps and stairs. Through the use of black concrete and sidewalk pavers as their finish surface these pedestrian thoroughfares will become an extension of the city’s own street system”.
It is difficult to claim that this ever became true, for Horton Plaza, more than most shopping centres, is very much a world of its own. It still “looks inwards” for all its openness to the sky, and the means of entering it are one of its failures. It is definitely not an extension of San Diego’s streets. The entrance from Broadway is the unexpected, untypical broad staircase, while on two other sides you come in from the adjacent multi-storey car-park building, itself an ugly wall between the surrounding office tower blocks and the Oz-like amusement-park feeling of the new shopping centre.
A four-hour experience
All the department stores left downtown San Diego in the 1950s and 1960s, moving, with the people, to suburbia. But Mr Hahn attracted four anchor tenants in Robinson’s, The Broadway, Mervyn’s and Nordstrom, who took 500,000 sq ft between them.
The department stores are at opposite ends of the site and in between, occupying 372,000 sq ft, are 150 speciality shops and restaurants, theatres, the 450-room Omni International Hotel and a seven-screen cinema.
From Monday to Friday 60,000 down-town office workers form a staple diet for Horton Plaza. Its success ultimately will depend on its ability to generate business at night and weekends, and on the injection of more potential plaza sightseers through, for example, the convention centre and the interplay of new and old San Diego attractions. Not far away is the luxury 27-storey Meridian condominium, the Fox theatre and the restored Victorian Gaslamp Quarter.
Research at other Hahn regional centres shows that 54% of visitors are not planning to buy anything. Horton of all places must be a destination for anyone within range.
Robinson’s doubled their initial 70,000 sq ft for a $13m outlay. After the opening they increased their sales plan from $15m to $22m. From holding 13 in-store events in the first year they decided on 187.
Interestingly, while Horton Plaza earns Mr Hahn only 7% profit — half the usual rate of success for a US shopping centre — it is third in his chain for sales per sq ft of retail space.
All such centres must be victims of their own identity. By the time they are a reality economic and social trends may have moved on. With Horton Plaza, Ernest Hahn managed to change course — and created a model for others to follow. Even so, the relationship between retailing and leisure has changed in only the last three or four years. Mr Hahn recognised this shortly after the opening, saying that if he was able to do it again he would want to add four or five blocks of community-related facilities and recreational leisure.
In this case, it probably makes no difference. Jon Jerde designed it as “a four-hour experience where your normal street defences will disappear; like stepping off a boat in Venice there is an infinite number of things to do.
“My main artistic concern is light and space, to modulate it, create a 22-act play with it. Wait until you see it at night!”
I did, and it was splendid.