The Horton Plaza Mall in Downtown San Diego was once vivid and colourful. The bright colours may still be there, but the consumers have gone: it has become a ruin of a mall. The property developer Stockdale now wants to convert it into a high-tech campus with entertainment facilities. A last visit to a remnant of history.
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What a shock. One expects an architecture of hysterical fun, bright colours, unusual spatial effects, squealing teenagers. And then this: the icon of postmodern architecture, “Horton Plaza Mall” in Downtown San Diego, is abandoned and deteriorating. Horton Plaza was once a “magnum opus” of the iconic planning office Jon Jerde. The gigantic complex opened its doors in a deteriorating Downtown San Diego in 1985. The outdoor mall, occupying six and a half city blocks, marked the beginning of the district’s regeneration. Today, the Gaslamp Quarter, adjacent to the south-east, comes across as fresh and vibrant. This, however, is no longer the case for Jon Jerde’s mall legend.
A challenging descent
Consumption patterns certainly change. The construction and business species “mall” has generally seen better days. Moreover, the labyrinth-like character of large-scale complexes such as Horton Plaza doesn’t go down too well with modern consumers, who prefer efficient and transparent routing. On top of that, the younger generation tends to order online anyway. Yet I couldn’t help feeling melancholic as I stumbled down the dusty corridors of the five-storey mall ruin this morning: blind windows, fallen off signs, elevators that no longer work. The latter presents a particular problem, as Jerde’s project includes dead ends and confusing paths, like many large-scale constructions from the 1980s. Once you have reached the top floor, the descent becomes quite a challenge.
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How to lose oneself
The Horton Plaza Mall was a $140 million downtown redevelopment project by The Hahn Company. As the first example of the so-called “experience architecture” by architect Jon Jerde, it was considered a risky and radical departure from the standard paradigm of mall design. Jerde’s design was based on the essay “The Aesthetics of Lostness”, which deals with “losing oneself“: uneven levels, long ramps, sudden falls, dramatic parapets, dead ends and colorfully painted facades border an inner courtyard in the center.
Innovation Hub?
In August 2018, Stockdale Capital Partners purchased the complex with the intention of developing it into The Campus at Horton, an office and retail complex. They proposed an “innovation hub” focused on technology and biotechnology companies. However, some retail, food and beverage and entertainment facilities were to be retained. At the time, the company was still hoping to start construction in 2019, with completion expected in the fall of 2020, but this did not happen.
It will soon be history
Frankly, however, I am fascinated by such architectural rough edges. In the future, the location will likely be smoother and easier to use, but definitely less playful. The property developer Stockdale is still planning to convert the ensemble into a high-tech campus with entertainment facilities. The architectural office Rios Clementi Hale from Los Angeles has already been commissioned. The reason for existing delays is ironically due to a lawsuit against the conversion initiated by shopping giant Macy’s, who still operates one of the few remaining open stores in Horton Plaza. The objection is unlikely to be successful in the long term, however. Jerde’s delirious consumer temple will soon be history.
And indeed, in January 2020 Stockdale Capital Partners announced that they had reached an agreement with Macy’s to close their business so that the redevelopment of the shopping center can proceed. Beginning in May 2020, Horton Plaza was fenced and demolished; the plan is to use it primarily as office space for a new technology center called “The Campus At Horton”. Completion is expected in 2022.
Playful grandeur is gone, fun is over
Unfortunately it will no longer be possible to marvel at the dilapidated, pseudo-Italian Piazzas and Latin American temple impressions, which gave an atmospheric insight into a time when architecture may not always have been tasteful, but was certainly sustained by a playful grandeur. Nowadays, this bright, cheerful spirit is often sadly missed.
East Dike is located in Dapeng, a mountainous peninsula in the direct proximity of Hongkong and Shenzhen. In 2018, the typhoon Mangkhut damaged the coastline to various degrees. In 2019, KCAP+FELIXX has been selected to develop the plans, restore the coastline and raise protection standards.
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With the ‘Triple Dike strategy’, the team developed an integrated approach towards the climate adaptive reorganization of the 130 kilometer long shore. In the concept, water safety strategies are connected to eco-development and nature restoration and merged with social and economic growth. On a 500m long strip in Yangmeikeng, the performance of the proposed nature-based strategies for the sea wall are tested and materialization principles are explored and refined. The realization of this demonstration zone is the first milestone in the construction of 18 kilometers of embankment to be completed by 2021.
Strategic design projects for 6 villages
For 6 villages along the shore, all originating from fishers’ communities, the strategy is turned into strategic design projects, creating unique and site-specific realms. The ‘Triple Dike’ is composed of three development zones, carefully embedded in the local conditions and responding to the specific future needs of every village. The small-scale identity will be protected and their different characteristics reinforced.
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Village Dongshan is situated in a quiet bay, allowing the embankment to be designed as a green park, merging the mountains and the sea. Guanhu is a creative and cultural district. The dike performs as a vivid green beach boulevard, a backbone that unites existing functions with new recreational facilities. Moonbay is built on a mountainside, overlooking the sea. The embankment acts as a balcony, overlooking the bay, connecting the village to the floating fishing restaurants. Shayuyong is a gateway port, designed as a robust and rocky embankment park. For Pengcheng with its beautiful beaches and as important touristic attraction, the reinforcement of the coast is turned into an attractive beachpark. Yangmeikeng is an exposed village along the coast, within an ecological and marine protection zone.
Demonstration zone, Yangmeikeng
The three protective zones of the ‘Triple Dike’ in Yangmeikeng strengthen its exposed character, turning the village into a contemporary fortress. The design evades the introduction of a grant metropolitan scale and supports the organic village life. A rich collection of places boosts the further growth of the local culture.
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The first zone is formed by a collection of ‘rain-gardens’, as part of the communal space. The lush vegetation of trees and shrubs blends with the adjacent mountains and offers covered and shaded places. The gardens collect and infiltrate rainwater and wave overflow. The middle zone is composed of a sequence of shifting walls, with different heigths. They create a plazas and sheltered terraces on different levels, connected by a scenic walk. The third protective zone consists of ‘wave-gardens’, mitigating the impact of the flow during storms. They are planted with robust beach vegetation and rocks and offer places for picnicking and to enjoy the view on the beach. Walls and pavement blend in with the sandcolor of the beach. The materialization illustrates the characteristics of the three dike zones: more delicate materials are used for sheltered places, robust and solid elements are used for the exposed zones.
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Project Credits
Design team: KCAP + FELIXX
Location: Shenzhen, China
Client: Water Bureau of the Municipality of Shenzhen
Year: 2019 – ongoing
Area: 1.2 ha
Status: tender won, preliminary and detailed design for 6 villages in progress
Participating parties: China Resource Group (design and construction management), Hope Landscape & Architecture (landscape and construction design), China water transport planning & design institute (engineering), Deltares
Hiding in plain sight, the words that developers use to describe their projects reveal an awful lot about the kind of city they’re trying to create.
It’s a sad fact that the vast majority of contemporary architecture writing is produced by property developers. What is somewhat less sad is the reality that much of this cringeworthy drivel goes largely unnoticed by the public, even as they walk past it every day. But as it hides in plain sight, covering the hoardings that surround construction sites, this development-speak is normalising a warped representation of urban life which obscures developers’ tendency to appropriate a neighbourhood’s cultural value for the purpose of profit.
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To give an introductory example of this development-speak, there’s few better sources than Crystal Bennes’ brilliant blog Development Aesthetics. In one of her most recent posts she identifies a hoarding surrounding Fish Island Village, a development by Peabody in Hackney Wick, London, on which is written three words which are ubiquitous in development: “Authentic, Vibrant, Eclectic”. These three words each deserve unpacking.
Authenticity takes time
Authentic comes originally from the Greek word authentikos meaning “original” which is itself connected to the word authentes meaning “acting on one’s own authority” (combining autos “self” hentes “doer” i.e. “self-doer”). Used these days to describe something which is genuine, rather than fake, authenticity is a highly valuable commodity in contemporary society, because it takes a lot of work to produce something truly authentic and this authenticity is hard to replicate quickly. What’s more, possessing authenticity (or authentic things) is a useful way of displaying one’s cultural capital, which has become an increasingly important measure of a person’s worth in post-materialist society (i.e. one in which people have largely transcended basic material concerns like getting enough food to eat). Creating a place that is authentic takes time, but by repeating the word so often in reference to a place you can buy, Peabody is advancing the idea that an authentic place is not something you necessarily need to spend time developing. Instead you can buy it (interestingly, this takes the word quite some distance from its “self-doing” origins).
Vibrant, meanwhile, comes from the Latin vibrantem meaning “to sway”. However, in its modern incarnation, which developed in the 19th century, vibrant suggests colour and vigour as well as motion. This expanded meaning makes “vibrant” a particularly useful word for the developer because value, in the capitalist system, is intrinsically linked to movement and vitality. As Marx explains in Capital, the capitalist system only works in motion, when exchange values stop circulating, value disappears and the system collapses. Put in the context of the present discussion, the value of property disappears in a place which is the opposite of vibrant – bland, colourless, dead. Which is to say that developers spend such a lot of time talking up a place as vibrant, up-and-coming and happening, not because they especially appreciate these qualities, but because they connote value in motion.
Poaching Value
Finally, eclectic suggests something which draws on many sources. It comes from Greek eklektos meaning “selective”. As used by Peabody, the word is supposed to suggest that there’s a lot of variety in Fish Island Village. This, too, is valuable to the developer. The problem is that a new development can’t really be eclectic. As with authenticity, it takes time to absorb influences from many sources. Neither a newcomer nor a new development will have had the time to absorb eclectic influences on their own. Assuming Peabody are not simply making an erroneous claim, any eclecticism (or vibrancy, or authenticity) they are referring to would have had to have been poached from the surrounding neighbourhood and its residents.
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There’s much more to discuss on this topic, but for now, let’s recap the two main observations that emerge from this short analysis: firstly, the reality of Fish Island Village cannot live up to the ideas contained within the words Peabody are using to describe it; and secondly, Peabody are not prepared to acknowledge the source of the values they claim for the development (i.e. the values of authenticity, vibrancy and eclecticism), or the work that has gone into producing these values, or the people who do that work. Instead, they prefer either to claim that these values exist simply by saying they exist, or to appropriate these values from the people who already live in the neighbourhood.
