In The News : 2002

2009  |   2008  |   2007  |   2006  |   2005  |   2004  |   2003  |   2002  |   2001  |   1999  |  

Start at the Base and Work Your Way Up

November 24, 2002
This article also appears on another site: The Japan Times

By ANDREW BARRIE

Special to The Japan Times

Jon Jerde is an architect, and he wants to change your life. The world has never been short of architects with ambitions to create a bold new future (designed in their signature style), but Jerde has actually done it -- it has been calculated that the buildings Jerde has designed collectively draw more than a billion visitors a year.

Tokyoites now have an opportunity to join those millions, as the architect has just completed a building in the Shiodome redevelopment zone in Shimbashi, the first of a series of Jerde designs soon to open around Tokyo.

Jerde was recently in town for the Shiodome opening of the new headquarters of Japanese advertising giant Dentsu. This forms one block of the massive redevelopment now rising on the site of a former rail-freight terminal in Chuo Ward, between Shimbashi and Tsukiji.

Interviewed after the opening, the silver-haired, affable architect stresses that, "To a great extent, it is our experience of the base that forms our opinions of cities -- the bottom 40 feet [12 meters], which is the domain of retail and entertainment," and the Dentsu block reflects this thinking. The project was designed in collaboration with renowned French architect Jean Nouvel. Nouvel designed the sleek 48-story glass office tower, while Jerde created a base that he describes as "not really a building, but more like an organic piece of the landscape -- a rock!" Composed as a series of stone terraces planted with foliage, which step up from a sunken plaza and are sheltered by a glass canopy, Jerde's structure contains shops, restaurants and a performing-arts center.

Now in his 60s, Jerde describes himself as a "place maker" rather than an architect or urban designer. His influential role in the evolution of the shopping mall has made him a key figure in debates about the future of architecture and urban design. Jerde's career began in the 1970s, when life was being drained from the centers of American cities by the proliferation of suburban shopping malls. Built to rationalized and standardized planning principles by profit-driven developers, these malls were usually designed to be as cheap as possible.

Jerde, however, saw the potential for malls to become centers of communal activity, rather than sterile shopping venues. "There is no communal life in America," says Jerde. "It has all disappeared because of the 'burbs. What I tried to do was to invent a reason to have a charged communal life." His concern is with how to create places that would draw people together and regenerate the sense of community that suburban sprawl was killing off.

Spicing up the generic mall formula, he focuses not on the issues architects usually obsess over, such as conceptual clarity, rational planning and refined aesthetics, but on the qualities that attract ordinary people to a place -- vibrant colors, dazzling visuals, exotic allusions. In short, he has reinvented shopping as a spectacular experience. "Experience," says Jerde, "makes the place."

Perhaps the most overwhelming product of this vision is the Mall of America, built in 1992 in Bloomington, Minn. Including 400 shops, 71 restaurants, a 14-screen entertainment complex, an aquarium and an indoor theme park, it is the largest shopping center in the U.S.

The Mall of America was built in the suburbs, but Jerde has also worked to revitalize struggling inner city areas, as he did with the Freemont Street Experience in Las Vegas. In the early 1990s, Las Vegas crowds were being drawn to the increasingly spectacular mega-resorts of the Strip, and the downtown area was in decline. Asked to help, Jerde turned a five-block section of Freemont Street (location of downtown Vegas' famous "Glitter Gulch") into a pedestrian-only zone and roofed it over with an arched canopy lined with millions of computer-controlled lights, converting the street into what he describes as "a tube of light." At night, the canopy becomes a giant TV screen, hourly presenting a multi-media spectacular. Jerde says the Experience cost $50 million to build, but drew $878 million in extra revenue to the area in its first five years.

Such figures have given Jerde a reputation as an urban miracle-worker, but while his work may be popular, it is not to everyone's tastes. Critics describe the architect's large-scale, theatrical creations as representing the "Disneyfication" of the city -- the creation of fantasy- or brand-based theme environments whose origins can be traced back to Disneyland, and which critics see as mere parodies of traditional urban environments.

According to this view, Jerde's retail/entertainment hybrids promote not community but consumerism, and encourage a shift of responsibility for public space from public entities to those in the private sector who can make money from it (prompting worries similar to those aroused by privatization in other sectors).

Jerde dismisses such criticisms as condescending and elitist. He says shopping malls were "always thought of as the bottom of the barrel in architecture -- but I declare they are the top of the barrel!" He asserts that if commercial buildings are designed in accordance with this assumption, they naturally become important civic amenities.

Although Jerde's Los Angeles-based firm, The Jerde Partnership, has completed buildings across the U.S. as well as in Europe, Africa, South America and Australia, much of his work is now in Asia. His current roster of Japanese projects includes multi-use complexes in Kawasaki, Osaka and Kitakyushu, as well as a section of the Roppongi Hills mega-development.

Jerde says his buildings are "all about hosting people." No matter whether critical opinion judges the Dentsu block and his other upcoming projects as spectacular or merely saccharine, there is no doubt that the way Tokyo shops will be increasingly influenced by his vision of architecture.