Jon Jerde

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Horton Plaza

Jon Jerde is an American architect based in Venice, California, principal of The Jerde Partnership and known for innovative mall design and "experience architecture." He is a graduate of the School of Architecture at the University of Southern California.

Namba Parks, Osaka, Japan

The new Eczacıbaşı offices at Canyon, Istanbul

After 13 years in the mall business working for others, Jerde's first big break was the 1977 design for the Horton Plaza Center ^[1], across from Horton Plaza Park in downtown San Diego, credited by some with single-handedly rejuvenating the city's downtown core by replacing several blocks of older structures. The design was a radical departure from traditional suburban mall design. It is a five story outdoor mall, with the main passage being diagonally oriented to the street grid and anchored by Nordstrom, Macy's, and a Sam Goody music store, and connected to a Westin Hotel and the Balboa Theatre. Its spatial rhythms include long one-way ramps and sudden dropoffs, dramatic parapets, shadowy colonnades and cul-de-sacs, and the design shatters many traditional mall-design rules such as lowering ambient arousal levels and protecting the maximal lines-of-sight to merchandise. Its fragmented spaces look and feel more like a postmodern art project than a serious mall, and its festive colors a contrast to the ubiquitous beige store architecture of the period. Critics have described it as being too inward facing, to the exclusion of existing buildings.

Despite all this, or because of it, Horton Plaza's^[2] radical design brought 25 million visitors in the first year. As of 2004 continues to generate San Diego's highest sales per unit area.

The Jerde Partnership went on to design the gigantic $680M Mall of America^[3] in Bloomington, Minnesota in 1992, the Los Angeles 1984 Olympics, the outlandish and synthetic urban experience Universal CityWalk and the pirate show and facade of the Treasure Island Casino in Vegas in 1993, the Las Vegas Fremont Street Experience in 1995, and more recently a string of important projects in Japan^[4], China, and Taiwan, including the Core Pacific City mall in Taipei.

Jerde's projects are consistently marked by three things: a respect for user experience unique among American architects, a lasting sense of clarity and fun in the final result, and a very high rate of return. In the first twenty days of operation, the Las Vegas hotel/casino Bellagio that Jerde designed for Steve Wynn achieved an impressive annualized sales of $1800 per square foot ($19,000/m²). In the architectural community Jerde has been an outsider, widely criticized for commercialization and artificiality, but his impact on the profession is increasingly hard to ignore.

Jerde currently resides in Los Angeles^[5] with his son, Oliver, and wife, Janice. He also has four other children: Katherine, Margaret, Jennifer and Christopher.