Jon Jerde, an architect whose designs seized on the human yen to shop, merging the mall and downtown, commercial and public space, and faux environments and real experiences, died on Feb. 9 at his home in Los Angeles. He was 75.
His wife, Janice Ambry Jerde, said the precise cause had not yet been determined. She said he had been treated for a number of ailments, including bladder cancer and Alzheimer’s disease.
“An established master of the modern shopping mall and all its clones and offspring,” as the architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable wrote of him in 1997, Mr. Jerde (pronounced JER-dee) spoke about himself as a place maker or a creator of experiences rather than as a builder of buildings.
His work, much of it alive with color and dazzle, was often perceived as an antidote to the bland malls of convenience that proliferated in the 1960s and 1970s outside American cities and helped drain the life from many of them.
In trying to reinvent the town square, Mr. Jerde was something of a controversial figure; he was lauded for his contemporary spin on the pre-suburban downtown and for creating urban (or urbanlike) destinations that drew diverse crowds for sightseeing, people-watching and money-spending. But he was also criticized for replacing authentic places with ersatz versions of them, and for designing theme parks for the acquisitive.
His designs, which have been realized around the world, include the massive Mall of America in Bloomington, Minn.; Horton Plaza, a five-story outdoor mall that helped revitalize downtown San Diego; and the Fremont Street Experience, a reimagining of the historic district of downtown Las Vegas. He also designed the Bellagio, one of the Las Vegas Strip’s most opulent hotels, whose proprietor, Steve Wynn, called Mr. Jerde “the Bernini of our time.”
Among Mr. Jerde’s other projects were Canal City Hakata, an office, entertainment and retail complex in Fukuoka, Japan, knitted together by waterways and adorned by fountains; and the Universal CityWalk, a pedestrian-only complex adjoining Universal Studios in Los Angeles, which The New York Times critic Herbert Muschamp described as “a zippy collage of signs and storefronts” that “is more likely to be nominated for an Oscar than for a Pritzker.”
The movie analogy was an apt one both for Mr. Jerde’s intentions and for his method. Putting together multilevel structures with vivid outdoor spaces, inviting walking paths and gathering spots, bright signs, and lighting both to amuse and to attract attention, he thought of his creations as settings for events to unfold — not for people to inhabit or work in but to visit and enjoy.
“We put people in a popular and collective environment in which they can be most truly and happily alive,” he said of his company, the Jerde Partnership, which he founded in 1977. Based in Venice, Calif., it now has offices in Seoul, Hong Kong and Shanghai.
Before he sat down to design a new project, Mr. Jerde often wrote about the experience he envisioned people having in the finished environment, and like a moviemaker he made storyboards sketching out a visitor’s narrative. His wife, who is also an architect, said in an interview, “He’d write a script for what he wanted you to feel.”
Jon Adams Jerde was born in Alton, Ill., on Jan. 22, 1940. His father, Paul, was a peripatetic engineer for oil companies, and before he and his wife, the former Marion Adams, split up, he kept the family moving, mostly in the West, as he traveled from oil field to oil field.
Jon eventually settled with his mother in the Long Beach, Calif., area. Mr. Jerde told The Los Angeles Times that he was a lonely child who built models of communities in his backyard from neighborhood junk.
For a time he studied engineering at the University of California, Los Angeles, but his first love was sketching and drawing, and after a chance meeting with a dean at the University of Southern California, who encouraged him, he switched schools and curriculums, graduating from U.S.C.’s school of architecture (where there is now an endowed chair in his name) in 1965.
A trip to Europe in the early 1960s left him impressed with the vibrancy of the Old World public squares he saw and an itch to recreate that at home. He worked for a Los Angeles firm that designed conventional shopping centers, and in 1977 he went out on his own, accepting a commission to design a mall for a San Diego downtown that had been more or less abandoned by San Diegans, its pornography shops and tattoo parlors catering to sailors from the ships moored in the nearby harbor. The mall, Horton Plaza, opened eight years later.
“After its debut in August 1985, the colorful, trendsetting retail-entertainment complex did the lion’s share of reviving downtown San Diego,” The San Diego Union-Tribune (now U-T San Diego) wrote in 2005 on the occasion of the project’s 20th anniversary. “A destination for urban shoppers, diners and moviegoers, the outdoor mall is teeming with distinctive architectural personality, a playful pastiche of faux architectural elements, tiled walls and fountains, and quirky connections via bridges, stairs and ramps.”
A concurrent project for Mr. Jerde was the 1984 Summer Olympic Games, held in Los Angeles. With a graphic designer, Deborah Sussman, Mr. Jerde created a series of colorful banners, gateways, tents and other elements to visually link more than 100 locations across a wide swath of the Los Angeles area. “An invasion of butterflies” was Mr. Jerde’s description of the approach.
Mr. Jerde was married four times and divorced thrice. In addition to Ms. Jerde, whom he married in 1990, he is survived by three daughters, Jennifer Jerde Castor, Maggie Jerde Joyce and Kate Jerde Cole; two sons, Christopher and Oliver; and four grandchildren.
In an interview with The Sacramento Bee in 2002, Mr. Jerde said that his interest in communal space had its roots in a reaction to his childhood isolation.
“I really love crowds,” he said. And by that measure at least, he achieved his vision.
“CityWalk is a shopping mall that refuses to be a shopping mall, where we’re desperate consumers of one another’s company,” the writer Ed Leibowitz declared in Los Angeles magazine in 2002. “It offers an 18-screen multiplex, a blues bar, a bowling alley, 28 restaurants and several dozen shops, but it gives away the best of itself for free.
“CityWalk is not L.A.’s Piazza San Marco, its Champs-Élysées, its 42nd Street and Broadway, but it comes closer than anyplace else we’ve got. By 8 p.m. our own Broadway is a netherworld of shuttered storefronts. Hollywood and Vine is a specter of the splendid crossroads that went wild on V-J Day. Only at CityWalk can we experience a New Year’s Eve countdown as frenzied and convivial as Times Square’s.”
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