Jon Jerde's Horton Plaza Mall Comercialismo Contextual Na Tradição de Charles W. Moore

JON JERDE’S HORTON PLAZA MALL:
CONTEXTUAL COMMERCIALISM
IN THE TRADITION OF CHARLES W. MOORE
by
Kevin Adkisson
A thesis submitted to the Faculty of the University of Delaware in partial fulfillment

of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in American Material Culture
Spring 2020
© 2020 Kevin Adkisson

All Rights Reserved
JON JERDE’S HORTON PLAZA MALL:
CONTEXTUAL COMMERCIALISM
IN THE TRADITION OF CHARLES W. MOORE
by
Kevin Adkisson
Approved: __________________________________________________________
Sandy Isenstadt, Ph.D.
Professor in charge of thesis on behalf of the Advisory Committee
Approved: __________________________________________________________
Martin Brückner, Ph.D.
Interim Director of the Winterthur Program in American Material Culture
Approved: __________________________________________________________
John Pelesko, Ph.D.
Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences
Approved:
__________________________________________________________
Douglas J. Doren, Ph.D.
Interim Vice Provost for Graduate and Professional Education and
Dean of the Graduate College
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This thesis would not have existed without the support of the Delaware Public
Humanities Institute Summer Research Fellowship in Material Culture Studies that
generously supported a research road trip from San Diego to Seattle looking at malls.
Even half emptied of stores, Horton Plaza was a powerful experience and its spatial
complexity and sheer joy enchanted me. As I sat eating Taco Bell in the colorful,
vertiginous food court, I knew I had to know more about the place. Now I do.
I am grateful to my advisor, Sandy Isenstadt, for his keen architectural eye,
patience, and guidance shaping this thesis. Special thanks to those at Winterthur,
especially Emily Guthrie, Catharine Dann Roeber, Ritchie Garrison, Ann Wagner, and
Greg Landry, who lent assistance and support, and to my classmates in the Class of
2016. The staff at Cranbrook, where I’ve completed my thesis, have been invaluable
in providing both library services and time to work, including Gregory Wittkopp, Judy
Dyki, Mary Beth Kreiner, and the inimitable Lynette Mayman. Thank you to my
family, Dale, Hayley, Paul, and Angela, and loved ones, including Chase Ward, for
your support and entertainment, and to my friends and colleagues from Yale and
Winterthur who served as sounding boards, editors, and encouragement: Danielle Lee
Wiggins, Murphy Thomas Temple, and Amy Griffin.
I must also recognize Kent Bloomer, ornament maestro, professor, and
collaborator with Charles Moore who first introduced me to the rigors and joys of
postmodernism as an undergraduate. Thank you for your insights into the era of this
thesis, and for being a mentor, employer, and friend.
iii
And most of all, special thanks to my dear friend Paul Doyle, without whom
there would have been no thesis at all. Thank you for reading countless drafts and
listening to endless ideas and (more often) frustrations. Your counsel, intelligence, and
wit have been invaluable, and your encouragement finally wrought this thesis into
being.
iv
TABLE OF CONTENTS
LIST OF FIGURES ...................................................................................................... vii

ABSTRACT ................................................................................................................ xiii
INTRODUCTION .......................................................................................................... 1
Thesis Structure .................................................................................................. 4
Chapter
1 THE HORTON PLAZA REDEVELOPMENT PROJECT ............................... 6
San Diego’s Horton Plaza Park and the Downtown Core .................................. 6
Urban Renewal and Retail .................................................................................. 9
Horton Plaza Site Redevelopment .................................................................... 12
The Centre City Development Corporation and Ernest Hahn .......................... 14
Hahn Hires Architect Jon Jerde ........................................................................ 23
2 CHARLES W. MOORE’S POSTMODERNISM ............................................ 26
The Rise of Postmodernism and Charles Moore .............................................. 26

Charles Moore’s Postmodern Architecture ...................................................... 29
Architecture, Fairy Tales, and Moore............................................................... 47
Urbanism, Postmodernism, and Moore ............................................................ 50
Jon Jerde and the Commercial Turn of Postmodernism ................................... 53
3 VICTOR GRUEN, THE MALL, AND THE CITY......................................... 57
Victor Gruen’s Vision of Retail and the City ................................................... 58

The Mall Developers’ Myopic Vision of Gruen’s Grand Plans ....................... 67
Downtown Retail Alternatives: Adaptive Reuse and Festival Marketplaces ... 69
Problems Facing the Development of Urban Malls in the 1980s ..................... 76
4 THE DESIGN AND EXPERIENCE OF HORTON PLAZA .......................... 79
Redesigning the Redevelopment ...................................................................... 79

Developing the Design ..................................................................................... 86
The Form of Horton Plaza ................................................................................ 96
The Aesthetics of Horton Plaza ...................................................................... 107
Shopping Horton Plaza ................................................................................... 127
Charles Moore, Disneyland, and Horton Plaza .............................................. 146
v
5 HORTON PLAZA AS CULMINATION OF MOORE’S
POSTMODERNISM ...................................................................................... 151
Charles Moore’s Legacy................................................................................. 151

Jerde, Moore, and Themed Space................................................................... 154
Charles Moore on Malls and Public Places .................................................... 157
Horton Plaza and the Twenty-First Century ................................................... 159
REFERENCES ........................................................................................................... 165
Appendix
PERMISSION LETTERS .............................................................................. 172
vi
LIST OF FIGURES
Figure 1 Aerial view of Horton Plaza and downtown San Diego, ca. 1990 ............ 3
Figure 2 View Horton Plaza (park) looking south over the future site of Horton
Plaza (mall), ca. 1940 ................................................................................ 8
Figure 3 Downtown San Diego, ca. 1973. ............................................................. 13
Figure 4 Project Boundaries, Horton Plaza Redevelopment Project, October

1973. Rockrise Odermatt Mountjoy Amis (ROMA) ............................... 15
Figure 5 Illustrative Concept Plan, Horton Plaza Redevelopment Project,

October 1973. Rockrise Odermatt Mountjoy Amis (ROMA) ................. 16
Figure 6 Exploded Isometric, Horton Plaza Redevelopment Project, ca. 1975.

Attributed to Archisystems for Ernest Hahn ........................................... 20
Figure 7 Plaza Pasadena, ca. 1974-1980. Jon Jerde for Charles Kober
Associates, Pasadena, California ............................................................. 24
Figure 8 Plaza Pasadena, ca. 1974-1980. Jon Jerde for Charles Kober
Associates, Pasadena, California ............................................................. 24
Figure 9 Sea Ranch Condominium 1, 1963-1965. Moore Lyndon Turnbull

Whitaker (MLTW), Sonoma County, California .................................... 33
Figure 10 Courtyard, Sea Ranch Condominium 1, 1963-1965. MLTW, Sonoma

County, California ................................................................................... 33
Figure 11 Unit 9, Sea Ranch Condominium 1, 1963-1965. MLTW, Sonoma

County, California ................................................................................... 34
Figure 12 Faculty Club, University of California at Santa Barbara, 1966-1968.

MLTW/Moore-Turnbull with Donlyn Lyndon, Marvin Buchanan, and
Bruce Beebe, Santa Barbara, California .................................................. 36
Figure 13 Dining room, Faculty Club, University of California at Santa Barbara,

1966-1968. MLTW, Santa Barbara, California ....................................... 37
Figure 14 Second floor plan, Faculty Club, University of California at Santa

Barbara, 1966-1968. MLTW, Santa Barbara, California ........................ 37
Figure 15 Charles Moore House, 1966. Charles Moore, New Haven, Connecticut 39
vii
Figure 16 Site plan, Kresge College, University of California at Santa Cruz,
1966-1974. MLTW/Moore-Turnbull with Marvin Buchanan, Robert
Calderwood, and Robert Simpson, Santa Cruz, California ..................... 40
Figure 17 Kresge College, University of California at Santa Cruz, 1966-1974.

MLTW, Santa Cruz, California ............................................................... 41



Figure 21 Model, Piazza d’Italia, 1975-1978. Urban Innovations Group and

Charles W. Moore with August Perez Associates, New Orleans,
Louisiana ................................................................................................. 44
Figure 22 Piazza d’Italia, 1975-1978. Urban Innovations Group & Charles W.

Moore, New Orleans, Louisiana .............................................................. 44

Moore, New Orleans, Louisiana .............................................................. 45
Figure 24 Children at play in the Italy-shaped fountain at the Piazza d’Italia, ca.
1978 ......................................................................................................... 47
Figure 25 Seaside, Charles W. Moore, hand-colored lithograph, 7” x 5,” ca.

1980-1985 ................................................................................................ 49
Figure 26 Church Street South housing development, 1966-1969, demolished

2018. MLTW/Moore-Turnbull with Marvin Buchanan and Donald
Whitaker, New Haven, Connecticut ........................................................ 52

2018. MLTW, New Haven, Connecticut................................................. 52

2018. MLTW, New Haven, Connecticut................................................. 53
Figure 29 Study for Moore’s façade along the Strada Novissima, ca. 1980 ........... 55
Figure 30 View along the Strada Novissima in the Corderie Arsenale, 1980. ........ 55
viii
Figure 31 Southdale Shopping Center, 1956. Victor Gruen, Edina, Minnesota. ..... 60
Figure 32 Postcard views of Burdick Street Pedestrian Mall/Kalamazoo Mall,

1957. Victor Gruen, Kalamazoo, Michigan ............................................ 64
Figure 33 Section, Midtown Plaza, 1964. Victor Gruen, Rochester, New York ..... 65
Figure 34 Midtown Plaza, 1964. Victor Gruen, Rochester, New York ................... 65
Figure 35 Ghirardelli Square, 1964. William Wurster of Wurster, Bernardi and

Emmons, San Francisco, California ........................................................ 70
Figure 36 Quincy Market at Faneuil Hall Marketplace, 1976. Benjamin

Thompson Associates, Boston, Massachusetts ....................................... 74
Figure 37 Faneuil Hall Marketplace, 1976. Benjamin Thompson Associates,

Boston, Massachusetts ............................................................................. 75

Boston, Massachusetts ............................................................................. 75
Figure 39 Early rendering for an enclosed Horton Plaza mall, ca. 1977-1981 ........ 80
Figure 40 Preliminary sketch for open-air Horton Plaza mall, ca. 1981 ................. 84
Figure 41 Preliminary sketch for open-air Horton Plaza mall, ca. 1981 ................. 84
Figure 42 Preliminary drawing for open-air Horton Plaza mall, ca. 1981 .............. 85
Figure 43 Model, Horton Plaza, ca. 1981-1982 ....................................................... 88
Figure 44 Model, Horton Plaza, ca. 1981-1982 ....................................................... 89
Figure 45 Perspective drawing, Horton Plaza, ca. 1982-1985 ................................. 92
Figure 46 Horton Plaza opening, Aug. 9, 1985 ....................................................... 95
Figure 47 Sketch attributed to Jon Jerde outlining the armature of Horton Plaza,
ca. 1981-1982 .......................................................................................... 97
Figure 48 Isometric drawing, Horton Plaza, ca. 1981-1985 .................................... 98
Figure 49 Section cut, looking north west, through Horton Plaza armature, ca.
1981-1985 ................................................................................................ 98
ix
Figure 50 Site plan, Beverly Hills Civic Center, 1982-1990. Charles W. Moore
and Urban Innovations Group in association with Albert C. Martin
and Associates, Beverly Hills, California.............................................. 100
Figure 51 Aerial view of Horton Plaza, ca. 2010 .................................................. 101
Figure 52 Sienna Cathedral, 1196-1358. Giovanni di Agostino, Giovanni Pisano,

Camino di Crescentino, Sienna, Italy .................................................... 104
Figure 53 San Pietro in Montorio, 1481. Donato Bramante, Rome, Italy ............. 104
Figure 54 Broadway Fountain at Horton Plaza park, 1911. Irving Gill, San
Diego, California ................................................................................... 104
Figure 55 Horton Plaza “Palazzo” pavilion, 1985 ................................................. 105
Figure 56 Horton Plaza tempietto with steel frame pavilion behind, 1985 ........... 105
Figure 57 San Gimignano, Italy ............................................................................. 106
Figure 58 San Gimignano, Italy ............................................................................. 106
Figure 59 Wonderwall, 1984, dismantled. Charles W. Moore and William

Turnbull with August Perez Associates, Kent Bloomer, Leonard
Salvato, and Arthur Andersson and Urban Innovations Group,
Louisiana World Exposition, New Orleans, Louisiana ......................... 108
Figure 60 Temporary installation of flags and tents for the Los Angeles 1984
Summer Olympics, 1982-1984. Jon Jerde and Sussman/Prejza............ 110
Figure 61 Temporary installation of painted cardboard tubes and banners for the
Los Angeles 1984 Summer Olympics, 1982-1984. Jon Jerde and
Sussman/Prejza ...................................................................................... 110
Figure 62 Temporary installation of scaffolding, fabric, and pictograph structure

for the Los Angeles 1984 Summer Olympics, 1982-1984. Jon Jerde
and Sussman/Prejza ............................................................................... 110
Figure 63 Color palette by Sussman ...................................................................... 112
Figure 64 Color palette by Sussman ...................................................................... 112
Figure 65 Banners by Sussman .............................................................................. 114
Figure 66 Banners by Sussman .............................................................................. 114
x
Figure 67 Material details ...................................................................................... 115
Figure 70 Claudia’s Sweet Bun Emporium, Horton Plaza, ca. 1985 ..................... 117
Figure 71 Victorian-inspired light fixtures ............................................................ 119
Figure 72 Tin-pressed ceilings within the red arcade ............................................ 119
Figure 73 Cast foam or concrete lion head ............................................................ 119
Figure 74 Cast foam or concrete corbels with acanthus leaf ornament ................. 119
Figure 75 Main Street USA, Disneyland, 1955 ..................................................... 121
Figure 76 Jessop’s Clock outside J. Jessop & Sons Jewelers, ca. 1940 ................ 123
Figure 77 Jessop’s Clock at Horton Plaza ............................................................ 123
Figure 78 View of Horton Plaza (park) looking south over future site of Horton
Plaza (mall), after 1920 ......................................................................... 125
Figure 79 View along Third Street sidewalk of Horton Plaza ............................... 125
Figure 80 Detail of the reimagined Knights of Pythias building intersecting red

arcade ..................................................................................................... 127
Figure 81 Obelisk by Joan Brow marking the mall entrance, 1985....................... 129
Figure 82 Entrance court ........................................................................................ 129
Figure 83 Red arcade, looking north (out) from the mall ...................................... 131
Figure 84 Entrance to the armature from Third Street ........................................... 132
Figure 85 The top of the steps, through the red arcade .......................................... 133
Figure 86 Signage, carts, and banners by Sussman/Prejza .................................... 135
Figure 87 Collage of six views within the armature .............................................. 137
Figure 88 View, looking south, across northern end of armature .......................... 139
xi
Figure 89 View, looking south, through central pavilion across southern end of
armature ................................................................................................. 140
Figure 90 Walls as screening elements layer views and frame space.................... 142
Figure 91 Intersection of circulation and framed views ........................................ 142
Figure 92 View from the fifth level of Horton Plaza north across the armature,
with San Diego’s central business district rising behind ....................... 145
Figure 93 Scenes of life at Horton Plaza ............................................................... 150
xii
ABSTRACT
Completed in 1985, architect Jon Jerde’s (1940-2015) Horton Plaza mall is an
urban fairy tale that stands as both a high point of postmodern commercial architecture
and a living expression of the theories of postmodern pioneer Charles W. Moore
(1925-1993). The mall, intended to revive and reinvent downtown San Diego, grew
from the modernist urban planning and retail theories of shopping center pioneer
Victor Gruen (1903-1980), yet presents itself in a distinctly postmodern form. Horton
Plaza’s colorful architecture embodies the postmodern movement’s shift from anti-
establishment origins in the academy toward its later, commercial flowering. While
Jerde made his career designing malls and entertainment architecture, Horton Plaza
stands apart among the architect’s work for both its visual richness and its engagement
with the larger architectural discourse. In particular, the aesthetics, materials, form,
and focus on placemaking demonstrated at Horton Plaza reflect the philosophies of
Charles W. Moore. Horton Plaza and its place within Moore’s sprawling legacy is the
focus of this thesis, which speculates about the continued impact of Moore and
postmodernism’s commercial turn on today’s built environment at a moment when
Horton Plaza itself faces almost certain demolition.
xiii
INTRODUCTION
Situated in downtown San Diego, California, Horton Plaza was, when it was
opened in 1985, a dizzying and delightful place to be, an urban wonderland holding
almost a million square feet of retail. The mall was a theatrical riot of movement and
decoration; paper-thin façades inspired by architecture’s history filtered through a
children’s book, with towers, stairways, and bridges connecting stores, restaurants,
parking, and entertainment. Horton Plaza embodied in its imagery a busy European
marketplace transposed into southern California. In this stucco stage set for shopping,
architect Jon Jerde (1940-2015) rejected the architectural homogeneity of the regional
mall in favor of an extended allegory of urban life.
The theoretical grounding and aesthetic moves behind Horton Plaza can be
traced to the writings and works of Charles W. Moore (1925-1993)—architect,
educator, and central figure in the postmodern movement. From the late 1950s until
his death in 1993, Moore explored in essays and in buildings how architecture should
relate to history, how buildings could act as energizing frames for daily life, and how
public space would be formed in a car-centric, technological age. These themes
animated Jon Jerde and his search to design a unique development in downtown San
Diego that was at once profitable and place-making.
The quality of discovery defines Moore’s architecture, and Horton Plaza
engages in a cinematic unfolding of space akin to the best of Moore’s work. Jerde
borrowed heavily from Moore’s toolbox of techniques, including the use of diagonal
planning, Mannerist and Baroque geometries, screens and cut-outs that layer space,
1
contrasts in scale and complexity, and color, neon, and graphics to define space.
Above all, Moore’s unwavering dedication to fantasy in architecture can be seen in
Horton Plaza, with its commitment to imagination, humor, and wonder paralleling
Moore’s own work.
Moore declared, “I see architecture as having a primary function of making its
inhabitants feel as though they are inhabiting something as they are someplace and
therefore somebody.” 1 His architecture was not concerned solely with the form or
shape of the building, but with the activity that it housed and the associations it
evoked. Moore’s career-long interest in how architects might form meaningful places
for human activity impacted Jerde and his desire for Horton Plaza to act as a central
gathering space for San Diego.
In these connections, Horton Plaza is a child of Moore’s thinking, adapting his
design ideas and theories to a retail setting, a building program that Moore himself
never directly addressed. As a case study of Moore’s principles in the realm of retail,
Horton Plaza raises questions about postmodern architects’ often idiosyncratic
approach to design, urban planning, shopping, theatricality, politics, and preservation.
Although they were never collaborators, Jerde referred to Moore repeatedly.
The resemblance was certainly noticed at the time, albeit only casually in reviews of
the mall by critics like Paul Goldberger. In this thesis I take a sustained look at
Moore’s influence on Jerde at several levels. While others have noticed Jerde’s use of
Moore’s design motifs, I articulate in detail how Jerde’s formal program drew from
Moore’s own work. Further, I argue that Horton Plaza is not simply a reflexive
1Kevin Keim, ed., You Have to Pay for the Public Life: Selected Essays of Charles W.
Moore (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001), xxv.
2
application of postmodern ornament to a shopping mall, but in fact deliberately
follows the principles laid out by Moore in his seminal writings on the nature of public
space in contemporary capitalist American society. Finally, I analyze how the
combination of form and ostensibly public program underpinned the initial success of
Horton Plaza and, perhaps, drove its subsequent decline.
Figure 1 Aerial view of Horton Plaza and downtown San Diego, ca. 1990.
Image provided by The Jerde Partnership, Inc.
3
Thesis Structure
Chapter One reviews the history of Horton Plaza’s site, and the struggles of
business and civic leaders to redevelop the failing retail sector in downtown San
Diego. This chapter outlines initial proposals of Ernest Hahn, the mall’s developer,
and how pushback against his staid plans helped lead to the radical rethinking of the
Horton Plaza site by its third architect, Jon Jerde.
Chapter Two reviews the writings and buildings of Charles Moore that formed
the intellectual and aesthetic lens through which Horton Plaza can be understood.
Moore’s essay, “You Have to Pay for the Public Life,” introduced many of the
preoccupations of his own career and of postmodernism more generally. This chapter
also reviews postmodernism’s shift around 1980 from academia to the commercial
realm, which helped create an atmosphere in which Horton Plaza’s whimsical design
became both fashionable and desirable to a wider audience.
Chapter Three reviews the theories of shopping centers as tools of urban
renewal developed by pioneering mall architect Victor Gruen (1903-1980), and how
those theories were tested in the real world. The chapter also reviews unique successes
in downtown retail in the generation before Horton Plaza’s opening, and the
challenges facing center city mall development in the 1980s.
The story of Horton Plaza’s design and construction begins Chapter Four,
which continues with a close study of the form and aesthetics of the mall. This chapter
also considers Horton Plaza within the context Moore’s theories of public space,
particularly the mall’s relationship to Disneyland, a designed environment Moore
celebrated.
4
The final chapter considers the place of Horton Plaza as a culmination of
Moore’s theories, and speculates on the larger impact of the mall on placemaking,
fantasy, and urban renewal in subsequent developments.
5
Chapter 1
THE HORTON PLAZA REDEVELOPMENT PROJECT
Horton Plaza mall grew out of a desire in the 1960s and 1970s to reinvent and
revitalize San Diego’s fading downtown commercial district through new, sweeping
redevelopment. The mall that opened in 1985 arose from a long and difficult series of
agreements between the developer, Ernest Hahn (1919-1992), and city officials that
were unique among postwar urban redevelopment plans in their methods of pooling
risk, combining resources, sharing profits, and balancing services for public and
private purposes. 2 The struggles and concessions made between Hahn, the city, and
concerned citizens in developing the mall influenced its built form, and certain aspects
of the finished mall can be traced back to direct political and economic compromises
and preservation mandates. This chapter examines the history of Horton Plaza from
early attempts at revitalizing downtown San Diego to the frustrations of its developer
and the city’s rejection of his proposed mall. The chapter concludes with the hiring of
a new architect, Jon Jerde, brought on to reformulate and reimagine the project.
San Diego’s Horton Plaza Park and the Downtown Core

The namesake for Horton Plaza mall, Alonzo Horton (1813-1909), was an
important businessman in San Diego’s early history who, in 1895, sold land to the city
for a small park across from his hotel, Horton House (now the U.S. Grant Hotel).
2
Jacques Gordon, “Horton Plaza, San Diego: A Case Study of Public-Private
Development,” directed by Bernard J. Frieden and Lynne B. Sagalyn (Cambridge,
MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Center for Real Estate Development: Dec.
1985), viii; also see Jordan Ervin “Reinventing Downtown San Diego: A Spatial and
Cultural Analysis of the Gaslamp Quarter and Horton Plaza,” University of Nevada
Las Vegas Thesis, 2007.
6
Named Horton Plaza, the urban park is small, around two hundred feet wide and
ninety feet deep, anchored by a fountain designed by architect Irving Gill (1870-1936)
in 1910. 3 The park would come to form the northern site boundary of the mall
redevelopment site. 4 For the first half of the twentieth century, historian Clare Crane
describes Horton Plaza park serving as:
the site for all important civic celebrations, political rallies and
Wednesday evening concerts by the City Guard Band. Wells Fargo
stagecoaches had the Plaza as their terminus, just as buses do now. The
Plaza was the center of civic life in San Diego, as Horton intended it to
be. 5
Horton Plaza park also formed the intersection of San Diego’s central business
district along Fourth Street and its shopping district along Broadway, anchored by
department stores Marston’s, Sears Roebuck, and Walker’s. 6 A row of theaters formed
the southern edge of Horton Plaza park, while blocks further south consisted of
Victorian commercial buildings and residences. These buildings, including six on the
3
Larry Booth, Roger Olmsted and Richard F. Pourade, “Portrait of a Boom Town: San
Diego in the 1880’s” California Historical Quarterly 50, no. 4 (1971), 363-394;
Florence Christman, The Romance of Balboa Park (San Diego: San Diego Historical
Society, 1988), 16.
4 As both the park and the mall share an identical name “Horton Plaza,” in this thesis
the historic park is referred to as “Horton Plaza park” and the mall as “Horton Plaza.”
5
Clare Crane, “A Stroll Through Historic San Diego,” (Pamphlet published jointly by
the San Diego Chapter of the American Institute of Architects, the San Diego
Historical Society, the Save Our Heritage Organization, San Diego Chapter of the
American Institute of Planners, and the San Diego Historical Sites Board, n.d.), 3.
6
Gordon, 12.
7
National Register of Historic Places, would be demolished, relocated, or reconstructed
for the development of the mall. 7
Figure 2 View Horton Plaza (park) looking south over the future site of
Horton Plaza (mall), ca. 1940. The Irving Gill designed fountain is at
the center of the small park. The Bradley building (far right), the Knights
of Pythias building (one block south, right), and the Balboa Theater
(dome visible at left) were reincorporated into the mall. Classic San
Diego/Martin S. Lindsay Collection.
7Matt Potter, “The fall of Horton Plaza: What happened between 1985 and now?,”
San Diego Reader, June 27, 2018,
https://www.sandiegoreader.com/news/2018/jun/27/cover-fall-horton-plaza/#.
8
After World War II, San Diego’s downtown department stores shuttered or left
for the suburbs. Broadway devolved from a lively shopping destination into a red-light
district, replete with sailors’ bars, low-end retail shops, and cheap single-occupancy
hotels. The once-distinguished theaters along Horton Plaza park devolved into adult
movie houses. 8 The condition of the park itself declined, with a deterioration of
landscaping, damage to the fountain and restrooms, and encampments of the city’s
homeless. Between 1945 and 1975, the area around Horton Plaza south of Broadway
saw no major new investment or development, and land values declined substantially
as the largely nineteenth-century building stock deteriorated. 9
In contrast to the inner city, San Diego’s suburbs were booming, in part
through expansion of Naval Base San Diego and the resultant economic activity. The
city grew from the 25th to the 8th largest city in the nation, a population change from
334,000 people in 1950 to 876,000 people in 1980, with almost all the growth outside
of the center city. 10 While the retail core downtown declined, shopping centers and
malls flourished in the suburbs.
Urban Renewal and Retail
When it set out to develop a downtown mall in the early 1970s, San Diego
hoped to succeed with a literal (and consequently, aggressive) transposition of the
8Jay Allen Sanford, “Pussycat Theaters—a comprehensive history of a California

dynasty,” San Diego Reader, June 29, 2010,
https://www.sandiegoreader.com/weblogs/bands/2010/jun/29/pussycat-theaters-a-
comprehensive-history-of-a-cal/.
9
Gordon, 3, 12.
10
Gordon, 12.
9
suburban mall form into the city center. Throughout the 1950s into the 1980s, urban
renewal schemes were developed and implemented nationwide in attempts to save
struggling city centers. As upper- and middle-class white citizens relocated en masse
to the suburbs, leaders in architecture and urban planning proclaimed that older cities
could not survive without drastic changes. The closely linked, and federally funded,
programs for highway construction and urban renewal would fundamentally change
the look and function of American cities, including San Diego.
Supported by powerful downtown business and civic coalitions, reinforced by
academic and trade experts who deemed downtown obsolete, and provided with
government financial aid (through highway and urban renewal legislation) and
eminent domain, ambitious renewal plans tore apart hundreds of cities across the
country, uprooting families and businesses by the thousands. 11 Acres of developed
downtown areas were cleared of poor and minority residents and businesses, and
leveled. This clearance resulted in large lots of land available for public and private
enterprises to redevelop. New residential projects, government and office buildings,
highways and parking structures, and retail enterprises were created to lure
suburbanites back to the center city. Among the top goals of urban renewal projects,
including those in San Diego, lay revitalizing the central business district.
An aspect of federal and state urban renewal legislation from the very start,
retail projects within urban renewal schemes had special conditions for development.
At the start of any urban renewal scheme, government planners prescribed appropriate
land uses, scales of development, and goals for renewal sites. As part of anti-
11
Bernard J. Frieden and Lynne B. Sagalyn, Downtown, Inc., How America Rebuilds
Cities (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1989), 27, 35.
10
corruption measures for cities accepting federal urban renewal money, it was illegal
for private developers to be involved in a project before the local government had
assembled ownership of the site and opened the project to bids, meaning land was
acquired and cleared without contractual guarantees as to its eventual redevelopment.
Once awarded a contract as part of an urban renewal scheme, the developer’s
job was to implement projects that realized the specific goals conceived by
government experts and that defined the purpose of each urban renewal site. 12 In
1959, the International Council of Shopping Centers published in its conference
proceedings the following direction from a Washington official:
You are buying the land at a discount. One of the reasons is that you
have agreed to improve it according to [the existing urban renewal]
plan. You can’t draw on your imagination and decide for yourself what
would be better for you or the site. It has to follow this plan. For that
reason, it is sold at a discount. 13
For developers who had found success building shopping centers in the
suburbs, these limits on publicly-supported downtown redevelopment schemes could
discourage their participation. In San Diego, developers competing to build on the
Horton Plaza site proposed projects that went against the wishes of city leaders and
taxpayer referendums (like not including apartments for seniors and the poor) in order
to better turn a profit.
12
Frieden and Sagalyn, 61.
13
Harris W. Willingham, “Shopping Centers in the Urban Renewal Program,” in
International Council of Shopping Centers 1959 Annual Convention Proceedings
(New York: International Council of Shopping Centers, 1960), 136.
11
Horton Plaza Site Redevelopment
Concerned with declining population and quality of businesses downtown, in
1958 San Diego formed its Redevelopment Agency. Led by the city manager and
including the mayor and city council, the Redevelopment Agency served to approve
all plans and expenditures of the various city departments and any private developers
wishing to carry out redevelopment work. The agency worked under the explicit
mandate that whenever possible, private developers rather than public agencies were
to undertake redevelopment. 14 Unlike other cities, the conservative leadership of San
Diego was not interested in applying for federal redevelopment funds, believing it was
best to attract private developers for redevelopment work in the city.
By the early 1960s, however, little private action to revitalize the declining
downtown led to an increase in community support for public, taxpayer funded
interventions. In 1962, the City Planning Department published a General Plan for San
Diego that was the first official acknowledgement that public powers might be
required to actively direct development downtown. The General Plan, however, again
recommended against federal urban renewal programs or the use of federal assistance.
Instead, San Diego would turn to state redevelopment laws. 15
14
Gordon, 13.
15
Gordon, 13.
12
Figure 3 Downtown San Diego, ca. 1973. Horton Plaza park is highlighted in
green and the future Horton Plaza mall site is highlighted in blue.
Highlights by the author. Rights provided by ArtStor, data source from
University of California, San Diego.
In 1965, the City Planning Department released its “Center City 75” proposal,
the first plan for a downtown renewal scheme to highlight the need to radically
reinvigorate or reinvent the blocks eventually occupied by Horton Plaza mall. The
proposal was broad in its scope, emphasizing the importance of land use efficiencies
and traffic planning but shying away from proposing economic development plans or
suggesting any specific physical changes to the downtown core. 16 The very ambiguity
16
Gordon, 14.
13
of “Center City 75” prompted little concrete action and instead stated what was
obvious on the ground: downtown San Diego was struggling.
What ultimately helped launch direct action downtown came back to the small
Horton Plaza park. In 1969, citizen complaints over the safety and appearance of the
small, iconic park (and specifically, the maintenance of the public bathrooms within
it), led to a city proposal to improve the park with $90,000 of public funds. City
planners argued against this large expenditure for cosmetic fixes: without
improvements in the economic health of the surrounding district, they argued, the
money on the park would be wasted. 17 Eventually, the citizens’ desire to improve
Horton Plaza park would lead to a plan to completely demolish the six blocks south of
the park for Horton Plaza mall.
The Centre City Development Corporation and Ernest Hahn
Growing from the plans developed by the city in the 1960s, the Horton Plaza
Redevelopment Project was approved by a voter referendum in 1972 to establish a 42-
acre redevelopment district downtown. This allowed the sale of tax allocation bonds to
purchase properties by eminent domain. The plan’s stated goal was to bring new
cultural, residential, and office spaces downtown, and the project was to be anchored
by “major retail enterprises.” 18
17
Gordon, 14.
18
Pamela Hamilton, “The Metamorphosis of Downtown San Diego,” Urban Land
Institute (April 1994); Gordon, 2.
14
Figure 4 Project Boundaries, Horton Plaza Redevelopment Project, October
1973. Rockrise Odermatt Mountjoy Amis (ROMA). Historic properties
are outlined in grey. Horton Plaza park is located at the top of block “5.”
San Diego State University, in the public domain in accordance with
California Public Records Act via Gov. Code § 6254 (k).
15
Figure 5 Illustrative Concept Plan, Horton Plaza Redevelopment Project,
October 1973. Rockrise Odermatt Mountjoy Amis (ROMA). Notice the
diagonal public retail moving southwest from Horton Plaza park. San
Diego State University, in the public domain in accordance with
California Public Records Act via Gov. Code § 6254 (k).
The city focused first on a 15-acre portion of the district and commissioned
San Francisco architecture firm Rockrise, Odermatt, Mountjoy and Amis (ROMA)
Partnership to develop a conceptual urban design. Completed in 1973, ROMA's
proposal included general plans for land use, open space, transportation and parking,
utilities, and financing for the project. The firm also sketched out building policies,
suggesting the function and massing of structures to be built, but not commenting on
the architectural style of the project. The city began assembling the site through
eminent domain in 1973, eventually spending $33 million to acquire a portion of the
proposed district. Laws governing the use of these public funds to acquire private land
16
mandated that any development on the site had to, in part, serve a public good. It also
made the city of San Diego the landlord and stakeholder of whatever project was built
on the site. Through a nationwide competition, in 1974 the city selected the firm of
Ernest Hahn, Inc. to partner in developing the site. 19
The same year, the Centre City Development Corporation (CCDC) was
established to streamline the bureaucracy overseeing the site, and to facilitate the
Horton Plaza Redevelopment Project’s realization. 20 Under its structure, various city
and private departments would carry out the redevelopment work while elected
officials (the mayor, city council and city manager) approved plans and expenditures,
all coordinated by a seven-member board and executive director. 21 The autonomous
public authority was the first nonprofit redevelopment corporation in the state, again
tying the ownership of whatever was developed on the site to the city of San Diego. 22
The city and CCDC’s lack of redevelopment experience caused delays,
including two years for the city and Hahn to agree to a Disposition and Development
Agreement (DDA) outlining the terms of the project. 23 The CCDC amended the
document an unusually high number of times, with thirteen changes between 1977 and
19
Gordon, 2.
20
Gordon, 1; Centre City Development Corporation, “Fact Sheet on the Centre City
Development Corporation,” 1982.
21
Gordon, 2.
22
Gordon, 6.
23
Gordon, 2.
17
1982 that altered nearly all the terms of the agreement to reflect shifting economic and
political conditions.
Ernest Hahn was one of California’s leading mall developers, and part of
Hahn’s motivation in applying to develop the Horton Plaza site was the ability to
leverage the downtown project to secure development rights for other suburban sites
in San Diego. 24 Though most of his portfolio consisted of regional suburban malls,
Hahn had experience with downtown malls in Pasadena and Long Beach. In those
instances, as in San Diego, local governments had assisted in the acquisition and
preparation of previously occupied sites. The difference in scale of the projects and the
cities, however, was striking. Pasadena and Long Beach had under 100,000 residents
and the malls Hahn developed had two anchor department stores. For San Diego, with
close to 900,000 residents, Hahn proposed building a mall with four anchor
department stores. 25
Over the course of the eleven year development and construction of Horton
Plaza, Hahn became the leading downtown mall redeveloper in California with nine
24
Potter, “The fall of Horton Plaza;” Chris Kraul, “Ernest Hahn, Pioneer of the
Modern Shopping Mall, Dies” Los Angeles Times (Los Angeles, CA), December 29,
1992, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1992-12-29-mn-2752-story.html. The
son of a German immigrant, Ernest Hahn started his professional life as a small
general contractor in Los Angeles in 1946. He began both developing and building his
own projects in 1963, opening his first regional mall, La Cumbre Plaza in Santa
Barbara in 1967. University Towne Centre in La Jolla (1977) and Fashion Valley in
northern San Diego (1981) had development and expansion rights tied to Hahn’s work
at Horton Plaza.
25
Gordon, 5.
18
projects underway by 1982. 26 By 1985, Hahn operated almost 30-million square feet
of retail space in thirty-nine regional shopping centers. 27 Horton Plaza, however, was
unique for Hahn in the length of time it took to complete, the large size of the city in
which it operated, and, most significantly, its exuberant design.
In his 1974 bid for the project, Hahn presented a scheme for the site produced
with architects and graphic designers at Archisystems of Van Nuys, California. The
Archisystems plan was ambitious, extending beyond the 15-block footprint of the site
and reaching San Diego Bay. The proposal called for hotels, residential, and
commercial buildings, and a convention center to support a proposed 500,000 to
750,000 square feet of retail space.
26
Gordon, 4. In 1980, Hahn Inc. was acquired by the Canadian-based Trizec
Corporation.
27
Gordon, 4-5.
19
Figure 6 Exploded Isometric, Horton Plaza Redevelopment Project, ca. 1975.
Attributed to Archisystems for Ernest Hahn. Horton Plaza park is
highlighted in green and the future Horton Plaza mall site is highlighted
in blue. Highlights by the author. San Diego State University Microfilm
Collection, CCDC Informational pamphlet, ca. 1975. In the public
domain in accordance with California Public Records Act via Gov. Code
§ 6254 (k).
Hahn’s most serious competition for the redevelopment project came from the
Maryland-based Rouse Company, a preeminent building firm founded by real estate
developer and urban planner James Rouse (1914-1996). Architect Frank Gehry (b.
1929) developed a plan that was significantly more ambitious than even Hahn’s,
incorporating a larger site and significantly more square feet of office, retail, and
residential space. Gehry was non-committal with his architectural solutions, telling
reporters: “We’re looking for a dialogue with the community. We need more
20
involvement before we’re prepared to design a project for downtown San Diego.” 28
Rouse pulled his bid for the downtown project in the spring of 1974, hoping to secure
development rights closer to the San Diego Marina. 29
Left as the only major developer, Hahn was awarded the development rights.
He hired a new architect, Frank Hope III (b. 1930), to rework Archisystems’s proposal
into something less expansive and expensive. Hope, a prominent San Diego architect,
had completed large public projects, including the San Diego Stadium and the Federal
Courts Building, but had no experience in retail design.
Hope’s plan for the Horton Plaza redevelopment site eliminated the apartment
buildings, office blocks, pedestrian walkways, and parks proposed by ROMA
Architects and Archisystems, leaving only the retail aspect of the development. It also
proposed a clean slate: clear the site entirely, razing three historic buildings noted by
both ROMA and the San Diego Historical Society as worthy of preservation. Hope
envisioned a single seven-block megastructure housing an enclosed mall raised over a
parking structure. Executives at Hahn’s office would later say that the Hope plan was
meant to “avoid the double negative [of building an urban mall]: going downtown and
being dramatically different.” 30
The Hope proposal was submitted to the city in June 1975. It was immediately
criticized by CCDC members as uninspired. Hahn stood by his plan in a memo to the
28
Beth Coffelt, “The City is Dead, Long Live the City,” San Diego Magazine, April
1974, 137.
29
Gordon, 24.
30
William Doyle, quoted in Gordon, 69.
21
corporation, arguing that the retail industry was traditional and conservative, and a
successful shopping center in downtown San Diego required “a center that has at least
some of the characteristics that are found to be comfortable, familiar, and
economically viable in the suburban centers…” 31 Meanwhile, an Environmental
Impact Report from the city lambasted the plan as
conceived for an extremely small segment of San Diego citizenry…

Middle-class women shoppers, office workers, and the proprietors of
retail and commercial establishments. The elderly...are functionally
excluded from the conception and physically walled out. There is no
provision for children. There is no space for casual activities, general
recreation and pedestrian or cultural interest… 32
Despite critiques of the design by the city and concerned citizens, it would take
almost two years before Hahn relented to reimagine the project and hired a new
architect. In these early years, Hahn appeared less concerned with the aesthetics of the
mall than with the struggle to secure tenants for the four anchor department stores he
felt were necessary to ensure the mall’s success. As in most mall developments, the
anchor stores would serve both as financial investors and as a measure of faith in the
project. By 1976, Hahn had signed only two anchors for the project, and with citizens
and city leaders unhappy with his proposals, what Hahn needed was a radical
rethinking of the mall’s design.
31
Gordon, 32.
32
Gary Shaw, “Did Consultants Go Too Far in Renewal Report?” San Diego Daily,
October 21, 1977.
22
Hahn Hires Architect Jon Jerde
In the summer of 1977, Ernest Hahn retained architect Jon Jerde, with whom
he had worked to develop earlier successful malls, to rework the Horton Plaza project.
Hahn had built several malls with the architecture firm Burke, Kober, Nicolai and
Archuletta (later Charles Kober Associates), where Jerde began his career in 1965 and
served as the design lead for a number of malls. The large Los Angeles-based office
specialized in shopping center design, and by the mid-1970s Jerde was vice-president
and director of design.
There were several architectural features developed in Jerde’s mall designs
with Kober Associates that would be advanced in the design of Horton Plaza: the use
of pathways to force perspectives and manipulate views, incorporating sculpture and
graphics as integral extensions of the architecture, and using abstracted architectural
forms to evoke historic buildings. Of particular note is Jerde’s design for Plaza
Pasadena, opened in 1980, that featured a stripped down, monumental arch aligned
with the city’s Beaux-Arts civic center. Inside, an enclosed courtyard featured massive
trompe-l’oeil murals merging the mall interior with the San Gabriel mountains that
surround Pasadena. These postmodern moves by Jerde while he was with Kober
Associates, however, were contained within large, monotonous brick box architecture
and pale in comparison to the full-on execution of the postmodern style at Horton
Plaza.
23
Figure 7 Plaza Pasadena, ca. 1974-1980. Jon Jerde for Charles Kober Associates,
Pasadena, California. Photograph by Walt Mancini, 1986. Courtesy of
the Archives, Pasadena Museum of History (Star News Collection).
Figure 8 Plaza Pasadena, ca. 1974-1980. Jon Jerde for Charles Kober Associates,
Pasadena, California. Courtesy of the Archives, Pasadena Museum of
History (Star News Collection).
24
As Jerde developed his new proposal for Horton Plaza (discussed in Chapter
Four), his design pushed the boundaries of what was expected from a downtown
development and the tenets of accepted mall planning. In order to excite city leaders,
make the mall project acceptable to civic interest groups, and satisfy the needs of
Hahn for a unique retail environment, Jerde pushed Horton Plaza’s architecture toward
a complex realization of the principles of postmodernism as developed by Charles
Moore.
25
Chapter 2
CHARLES W. MOORE’S POSTMODERNISM
Jon Jerde’s design for Horton Plaza leans heavily on the principles of
placemaking and the aesthetics of postmodern leader Charles W. Moore. This chapter
examines Moore’s writings, buildings, and philosophy concerning the role of the
architect in society, and how Moore identified problems of placelessness in
monumental urban architecture and the ways in which he proposed restoring meaning
and pleasure back to urban experiences. Jerde was clearly influenced by Moore, and
Horton Plaza’s represents a convergence between Moore’s brand of postmodernism
and a wider commercialization of the postmodern style occurring in the early 1980s.
The Rise of Postmodernism and Charles Moore
Charles Moore developed his unique strain of postmodernism through his
articles, essays, and books; built work produced with the four firms of which he was a
part across his career; and his teaching and leadership positions at University of
California, Berkeley, Yale, and the University of Texas at Austin. He began
publishing nationally as a critic and correspondent for Architectural Record in 1958,
after earning his master’s and Ph.D. at Princeton University (the university’s first in
architecture). 33 Moore began teaching around the same time, and rose to prominence
as the youngest tenured faculty member and then chairman of the architecture
department at Berkeley by 1961. 34
33 Keim, 3, 21.
34 David Littlejohn, Architect: The Life and Work of Charles W. Moore (New York:
Holt, Rinehart and Wilson, 1984), 148.
26
Published in 1965, Yale’s architecture journal Perspecta 9/10 helped identify
the new generation of American architects, including Moore, leading the deflationary
critique of modernist heroics through writings and building projects. The double issue,
edited by student Robert A.M. Stern (b. 1939) and dubbed the "Post Modern
Perspecta," included essays by established modernists Philip Johnson (1906-2005),
Louis Kahn (1901-1974), and Paul Rudolph (1918-1997) alongside the lesser known
Moore, Romaldo Giurgola (1920-2016), and Robert Venturi (1925-2018).
In their contributions, Venturi and Moore recognized an emerging pluralism,
describing it variously as collage, layering, ambiguity, collision, or, memorably by
Venturi, a preference for the “both-and” over “either-or.” 35 Venturi contributed a
section of his forthcoming Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, a “gentle
manifesto” that challenged the future of abstract modern architecture, pushed for
buildings that celebrated the ambiguous over the simplistic, and served as a definitive
text of emerging postmodern theories. 36 Moore’s essay, “You Have to Pay for the
Public Life” was equally iconoclastic, and argued that the failure of modernism lay in
its failure to offer the public a sense of place.
In the essay, Moore relayed his search for and conclusions about urban
monumental architecture in California. Without the pedestrian urbanism of European

or east coast cities, Moore found that in California the air-conditioned single-family
35 Robert
Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (New York: The
Museum of Modern Art, 1966), 23.
36 Charles Moore, “You Have to Pay for the Public Life,” Perspecta 09/10 (1965),
reprinted in Robert A.M. Stern, Alan Plattus, Peggy Deamer, eds., [Re]Reading
Perspecta: The First Fifty Years of the Yale Architectural Journal (Cambridge, MA:
The MIT Press, 2004), 158-159; Venturi, 16-19, 23.
27
home and air-conditioned car had triumphed over any traditional notion of
monumental, urban space. He wrote that “in the city, urban and monumental places,
indeed urbanity and monumentality themselves, can occur when something is given
over by people to the public,” and argued that California’s insistence on
accommodating the individual had created a region devoid of traditional urban
space. 37 Instead, he found meaningful public life behind the ticketed experience of
Disneyland, opened a decade before his essay was published.
Moore meant the title of his essay, “You Have to Pay for the Public Life,”
literally—the only places in California he found meaningful urban experiences were in
private developments with paid admission like Disneyland—and figuratively—public
life does not come without individual economic sacrifice. Moore introduced
Disneyland as both valid architecture and worthy urban experience, an example of
how public life was being engaged in a positive and popular way without architects
and outside of the field’s sphere of influence. He cautioned, however, that its ability to
be replicated was limited by its very singularity.
Moore believed that the role of the architect was in making places, not forms.
In his 1967 essay “Plug It In, Rameses, and See If It Lights Up, Because We Aren’t
Going to Keep It Unless It Works,” written for a later issue of Perspecta and after he
had been appointed chair of Yale’s architecture department, Moore defined the
responsibility of the architect:
If architects are to continue to do useful work on this planet, then surely

their proper concern must be the creation of place—the ordered
imposition of man’s self on specific locations across the face of the
37 Moore, “You Have to Pay,” 173.
28
earth. To make a place is to make a domain that helps people know
where they are, and by extension, know who they are. 38
Implicit in his writing is a critique of the heroic, high modern architects of the
preceding generation, and an insistence on the richness of architecture beyond formal
issues that seemed to preoccupy the midcentury architect. His writings helped validate
a return toward tradition, beauty, and pleasure as architectural goals. For Moore,
architecture was an inclusive art. As Robert A. M. Stern later observed, Moore
“showed us that we could put in as much as an earlier generation had taken out.” 39
The California context Moore evaluated in “You Have to Pay for the Public
Life” was the landscape that Jerde confronted with the Horton Plaza redevelopment
site: a downtown without much in the way of traditional urban life, a population
largely relocated to the suburbs and reliant on cars to get into the city, and a large site
being cleared of its history in preparation for, as initially planned, a banal
megastructure. Like Moore, Jerde argued that architecture must play a role in
establishing community. The aesthetics of Horton Plaza also turn towards Moore’s
influence.
Charles Moore’s Postmodern Architecture
Moore wrote that “A good deal of what makes modern architecture terrible is
that it is so often an attempt to get the universal solution to what isn’t the universal
38 Robert A. M. Stern with Raymond Gastil, “Charles Moore: The Architect Running
in Place,” in Charles Moore: Buildings and Projects 1949-1986, ed. Eugene J.
Johnson (New York: Rizzoli, 1986), 35.
39 Stern, 35.
29
problem.” 40 His own buildings rebuked modernism’s placelessness, minimalism, and
apparent disregard for history through experimentation with scale and materials,
incorporation of pastiche and irony, and manipulation and adaptation of historic styles
in order to establish memorable places.
Moore turned to history as a way of developing designs. Having first visited
Hadrian’s Villa in Tivoli on a George G. Booth Traveling Fellowship after his 1949
graduation in architecture from the University of Michigan, Moore returned to the
Villa on subsequent trips to Europe. Moore expounded on lessons gleaned from the
sprawling, second-century villa ruins throughout his career. These included an
appreciation of complexities in plan, use of colliding and overlapping geometries, and
the play of ruination, reconstruction, and fragmentation. For Moore, the intangible joy
of Hadrian’s Villa lay in the site’s condition allowing every visitor to create their own
interpretation of the place. He felt his architecture should do the same. 41 Moore’s
preference for layering space, manipulating scale, and incorporating associative forms
repeated these lessons, and were to be adapted by Jerde at Horton Plaza.
An inclusive attitude to history reflected Moore’s understanding “that we can
learn from the past—indeed, that it is already a part of us, and that we cannot avoid
learning from it.” 42 Specific references in his work were sometimes clear and other
times esoteric, relying on the architect’s encyclopedic knowledge of architectural
40 JohnW. Cook and Heinrich Klotz, Conversations with Architects (New York:
Praeger, 1973), reprinted in Keim, 177.
41 Charles Moore, “Hadrian’s Villa” in Perspecta 6 (1960), reprinted in Keim, 61-76.
42 Charles Moore, “Plaster in Architecture” in Manual of Lathing and Plastering, John
R. Diehl (n.p.: MAC Publishers Association, 1960) in Keim, 37.
30
history and his extensive travels to create or inspire designs. Uninhibited and hybrid,
Moore abstracted and combined the past into something new. He had little concern
that the public would pick up on what his exact source material might have been,
instead arguing that “people carry around images of their own, and if lots of things are
present, the chances of their connecting with something are much improved.” 43
Moore was fond of saying that “architecture ought to be looked at as
choreography of the familiar and the surprising,” and his use of the term choreography
extended into his conception of architecture as frames for movement through space. 44
Moore dramatized differences of importance and, as collaborator Kent Bloomer
observed, “freely moving from the miniature to the magnificent is Moore’s greatest
compulsion.” 45 As Moore wrote:
…buildings are like plays, narrative objects which can have the same
variety of roles that plays have. Buildings, that is, can make comments
about the situation, about their site, about the problem of holding the
outside out and the inside in, and the problem of getting themselves
built, about the people who use them or the people who made them—
all sorts of things that can be funny, or sad, or stupid, or silent, or
dumb. I maintain that all those things are legitimate things for buildings
43Charles Moore, “The Yin, the Yang, and the Three Bears,” in Charles Moore:
Buildings and Projects 1949-1986, ed. Eugene J. Johnson (New York: Rizzoli, 1986),
19.
44 Charles Moore interview with Leon Luxemburg, previously unpublished, conducted
in 1991 and reprinted in Keim, 323.
45Kent Bloomer, “Form, Shape, and Order in the Work of Charles Moore,” in Charles
Moore: Buildings and Projects 1949-1986, ed. Eugene J. Johnson (New York:
Rizzoli, 1986), 21.
31
to do, and that architects who have tried to make everything sublime,
however stupid its purpose, have…lost the attention of the public. 46
In order to shape this theatricality, Moore’s architecture relied on a clear
distinction between center (inside) and boundary (marking the transition to outside). 47
He argued that it was human to want to feel inside of something (whether as an
individual, like in a home, or as a group, like in a plaza), and his work regularly
encloses space with continuous outer boundaries into which entrances and apertures
are subordinate. 48 This can be seen in his early important work at Sea Ranch,
completed in 1965 in collaboration with partners William Turnbull (1935-1997),
Donlyn Lyndon (b. 1936), and Richard Whitaker (b. 1933), along with landscape
architect Lawrence Halprin (1916-2009), where the condominium complex appears as
a solid, wooden fort from the outside. Inside, however, the courtyard carefully aligns
openings, windows, and shed roofs to frame views of the rural Sonoma County
coastline, while the condominium interiors are wildly complex arrangements of
interwoven shared and private spaces. The guarded outside conceals the interior
drama.
46 Cook and Klotz, 167.

47 Bloomer, 23.
48Donlyn Lyndon, “Inside and Outside,” in Charles Moore, Donlyn Lyndon, Patrick
Quinn, and Sim Van der Ryn, “Toward Making Places,” Landscape (Autumn 1962),
reprinted in Keim, 94.
32
Figure 9 Sea Ranch Condominium 1, 1963-1965. Moore Lyndon Turnbull
Whitaker (MLTW), Sonoma County, California. Photograph by Kevin
Keim. © Kevin Keim.
Figure 10 Courtyard, Sea Ranch Condominium 1, 1963-1965. MLTW, Sonoma

County, California. Photograph by Kevin Keim. © Kevin Keim.
33
Figure 11 Unit 9, Sea Ranch Condominium 1, 1963-1965. MLTW, Sonoma
County, California. This was Charles Moore’s own unit, filled with
pieces from his collection of folk art and found objects. Photograph by
Jim Alinder. © Jim Alinder.
34
In later work, Moore’s building’s boundaries are constructed of thin,
freestanding walls. By overlapping screen walls, Moore created not only centers and
boundaries, but juxtapositions of shapes and views in and out and a Baroque play of
light and shadow. 49 At the University of California, Santa Barbara Faculty Club, the
shape of the building is difficult to understand as its perimeter is defined by non-linear
screen walls painted the beige color of its Spanish Colonial Revival context. The plan
of the building is an irregular, fragmented polygon centered around a rectangular
courtyard. Dominated by a great tiled shed roof, the building is entered through a front
door that opens almost immediately onto a bridge that bisects a colorful, wedge-
shaped three-story dining room. Walking forward, guests face a large, diagonal wall,
and off the bridge, stairs lead up to a library and down to the dining room, adding
dimension to the vertiginous composition. Windows do not give views into the
landscape, but rather to the backside of the exterior screen walls, a way of diffusing
light that Moore credits to his mentor from Princeton, Louis Kahn. Praised in the
architectural press at its 1968 opening, the Faculty Club’s interior, also by Moore,
made use of neon banners, commercial furnishings, and antiques (including a Flemish
tapestry and taxidermy animal trophies) in nods to Pop Art, roadside architecture, and,
with the animal heads, traditional university clubs.
35
Figure 12 Faculty Club, University of California at Santa Barbara, 1966-1968.
MLTW/Moore-Turnbull with Donlyn Lyndon, Marvin Buchanan, and
Bruce Beebe, Santa Barbara, California. © Charles Moore Foundation.
36
Figure 13 Dining room, Faculty Club, University of California at Santa
Barbara, 1966-1968. MLTW, Santa Barbara, California. © Charles
Moore Foundation.
Figure 14 Second floor plan, Faculty Club, University of California at Santa

Barbara, 1966-1968. MLTW, Santa Barbara, California. The blue arrow
denotes the position of the photographer in Figure 13, added by the
author. © Charles Moore Foundation.
37
The materials deployed by Moore were often inexpensive—wood, stucco, and
paint—and relied on unique combinations of what was buildable, available, and
affordable. 50 He elevated common materials by layering in references, unexpected
juxtapositions, and a Pop Art sensibility of color, often done in collaboration with
designers Barbara Stauffacher Solomon (b. 1928) or Tina Beebe (b. 1947). Moore also
incorporated historic architectural fragments or folk-art pieces into interiors, as at his
house in New Haven of 1966 where salvaged Ionic columns were integrated into the
structure. The too-short columns were topped with jacks to assist in holding the floor
above—an unexpected combination of tradition architecture and functional tools.
Moore called these elements his architecture’s “jewelry.” 51 Together, the layers of
color, walls, and spolia give his work a collage-like appearance. As he wrote,
My particular interest is in using familiar pieces, mostly cheap pieces,

putting them together in ways that they have never been before. I think
that’s a better way of making a revolution than just inventing a whole
new crazy set of shapes. 52
50 Thomas Krens, forward to Charles Moore: Buildings and Projects 1949-1986, ed.
Eugene J. Johnson (New York: Rizzoli, 1986), 11.
38
Figure 15 Charles Moore House, 1966. Charles Moore, New Haven, Connecticut.
View of the dining room toward the kitchen with columns assisted by
jacks supporting beam above and tablescape of toys in multicolored
AMAC plastic boxes in foreground. Photograph by John Hill. © Charles
Moore Foundation.
This design philosophy is clearly expressed in Kresge College at the University
of California, Santa Cruz, designed from 1964 and completed in 1974. There, Moore
designed a residential undergraduate college not as a monastic quadrangle in the
manner of Oxford or Cambridge, but as a metaphor of a village, strung along a sloped
and winding pathway following the contour of its hilly site. Set within a redwood
forest, the college appears like a walled city of buff colored stucco punctured by large
and small portals. Moving inside one discovers layers of white walls screening
39
colorful ceilings and accent walls, with dormitory rooms accessed along open
passageways that recall roadside motels. These pathways are fronted by screen walls-
turned-porticos that open rhythmically along the street. Moore referred to the basic
planning idea coming from visits to Italian hill towns and Greek island villages, along
with a desire to escape the Cartesian logic of modernist design. Beyond his own
travels, Moore was also responding to the influential 1965 Museum of Modern Art
exhibition Architecture without Architects, which praised the organically developed
European urbanism. 53
Figure 16 Site plan, Kresge College, University of California at Santa Cruz,

1966-1974. MLTW/Moore-Turnbull with Marvin Buchanan, Robert
Calderwood, and Robert Simpson, Santa Cruz, California. © Charles
Moore Foundation.
53 EugeneJ. Johnson, “Performing Architecture: The Work of Charles Moore,” in

Charles Moore: Buildings and Projects 1949-1986, ed. Eugene J. Johnson (New
York: Rizzoli, 1986), 72.
40
MLTW, Santa Cruz, California. Rights provided by ArtStor, data source
from University of California, San Diego.

MLTW, Santa Cruz, California. Rights provided by ArtStor, data source
from University of California, San Diego.
41
MLTW, Santa Cruz, California. Courtesy of the Author, 2017.

MLTW, Santa Cruz, California. Courtesy of the Author, 2017.
42
As the Kresge program did not include a chapel or a library, traditional anchors
of college life, Moore instead created nodes along the village street by celebrating the
laundromat, telephone booths, and administrative building with enormous screen walls
called out with supergraphics. Moore referred to college as “an urgently important
four-year-long operetta,” and Kresge College acts as both housing and stage set. 54
Both stage set and civic monument, Moore’s Piazza d’Italia in New Orleans,
designed in 1975 and completed in 1978, further advanced Moore’s ideas about urban
planning, defining space, and incorporating history. Combining strong, symbolic
shapes into a downtown square celebrating the Italian immigrant communities of
Louisiana, the Piazza was the only realized portion of a larger, competition-winning
commercial redevelopment proposal designed with Urban Innovations Group and
August Perez Associates. Semicircular rings of screen walls and columns with
oversize Doric, Ionic, Corinthian, and what Moore christened “Ironic” columns
surround a stepped and tiled fountain in the shape of Italy (as Moore said, “What
could be a more Italian shape than Italy?” 55). Water jets and neon highlighted
elements of the colorful composition to a pleasingly Pop Art effect. Moore creatively
combined American commercial design with European traditions into a public space
that blurred the line between high and low architecture.
54 Littlejohn, 230.
55Charles Moore, “Ten Years Later,” Places 1, no. 2 (Winter 1984), reprinted in
Keim, 310.
43
Figure 21 Model, Piazza d’Italia, 1975-1978. Urban Innovations Group and
Charles W. Moore with August Perez Associates, New Orleans,
Louisiana. The proposed retail component stands opposite the ceremonial
fountain and screen wall. Rights provided by ArtStor, data source from
University of California, San Diego.

Moore, New Orleans, Louisiana. © Charles Moore Foundation.
44
Moore, New Orleans, Louisiana. Photograph by Norman McGrath.
Rights provided by ArtStor, data source from University of California,
San Diego.
45
The adaptation of popular forms in architecture was not unique to Moore, but
an important aspect of the larger postmodern movement. Rigorous intellectual
engagement with the commercial vernacular was published in 1972 with Robert
Venturi, Denise Scott Brown (b. 1931) and Steven Izenour’s (1940-2001) Learning
from Las Vegas. The book grew out of a course at Yale, where Moore had hired
Venturi and Scott Brown to teach and had supported their Las Vegas studio. 56 The
authors argued for the reality of the commercial pleasures experienced in Las Vegas,
and introduced a generation of architects to the commercial strip as a powerful form
worthy of attention. Moore’s work, like the Piazza, further placed vernacular
commercial design into high architecture as a formal and theoretical position. 57
Moore’s work in New Orleans combined the joy (and cost efficiency) of the
commercial vernacular with historic forms and the play of water to create meaning
through an architecture of signs, association, and pleasure. While the planned
developments meant to ring the Piazza never materialized, his urban square made a
significant impact on the scaling up of postmodernism’s theoretical ideas. Further, the
Piazza would have an enormous influence on Jon Jerde and his designs of Horton
Plaza, which began at the same time as the Piazza’s completion and its attendant
publication and praise in the architectural press.
56 Alexandra Lange, “Why Charles Moore (Still) Matters,” Metropolis (May 20, 2014)
https://www.metropolismag.com/architecture/why-charles-moore-still-matters/.
57
Terry Farrell and Adam Nathaniel Furman, Revisiting Postmodernism (Newcastle
upon Tyne: RIBA Publishing, 2017), 24.
46
Architecture, Fairy Tales, and Moore
What is perhaps most striking about the Piazza is its cheerfulness. Play and
fantasy are integral elements in Moore’s oeuvre. In New Orleans, the combination of
color, neon, and water create an open, urban square unlike anything else in the public
realm. In all of Moore’s projects, he uses fantasy and joy to create place, establish
meaning, and, as Kent Bloomer observed, “proclaim life.” 58
Figure 24 Children at play in the Italy-shaped fountain at the Piazza d’Italia,

ca. 1978. © Charles Moore Foundation.
In a 1975 lecture, “Architecture and Fairy Tales,” Moore argued that buildings
could embody the feelings of fairy tales and produce realities “of immeasurable
58 Bloomer, 21.
47
dimension—of insides bigger than the outsides—of edges near the center, of places
where the familiar rules are for a time suspended.” Fairy tales magically open the
world of everyday reality into a “surprising new world of incalculable dimension,”
like Narnia’s wardrobe or Alice’s looking glass. Horton Plaza would behave in the
same way: one enters from the reality of the city into an alternative street where “the
familiar rules are for a time suspended.” 59 The characteristics Moore identified as
belonging in fairy tale architecture—wonder, yearning, surprise—would be used by
Jon Jerde to heighten Horton Plaza’s architectural potency.
Moore advocated for architecture to reclaim pleasure as an important design
goal. As he said:
I am not trying to preach an architectural revolution that would require

all of us to produce unending architectural fairy tales, but I do think
that it is time to reject the restrictions that have made us ashamed to do
things with an element of mystery, so that we can explore this realm,
which is, I believe, an important part of our own minds and of the
world around us. 60
While Moore called these mysteries and fantasies components of fairy tale
architecture, what he was advocating for was experiential design. Architecture should,
and could, be affecting on multiple levels for the widest possible variety of users. By
being expressive beyond pure form, architects can, Moore believed, build meaningful
places.
59 Charles
Moore, “Architecture and Fairy Tales,” speech delivered as the John
William Lawrence Memorial Lecture, Tulane University, 1975, reprinted in Keim,
240.
60 Moore, “Architecture and Fairy Tales,” 278.
48
Figure 25 Seaside, Charles W. Moore, hand-colored lithograph, 7” x 5,” ca.
1980-1985. Throughout his life, Moore created architectural fantasies as
gifts, illustrations, and inspiration for real projects. © Charles Moore
Foundation.
By the 1980s Moore’s writings and buildings had transformed the architectural
profession by, as Stern writes, “reintroducing the reality of the architectural experience
into the ideality of the Academy.” 61 After decades of modernist abstraction, Stern
concludes Moore’s greatest gift to the profession was the conviction that:
Architecture could once again give pleasure, whether in a theatrical

composition of staircases, balconies, cutouts, and skylights or in a
61 Stern, 37.
49
sensual use of colors and materials. Architecture could also give the
pleasure of memory, informed by an awareness of context, and of
history. 62
Horton Plaza would rely on many of these tropes to create its theatricality, and
Jerde aimed to achieve the sense of place and public delight Moore found missing in
his 1965 search for California urbanism.
Urbanism, Postmodernism, and Moore
Horton Plaza would occupy a significant section of downtown San Diego and
it is therefore important to understand postmodernism’s relationship to urban planning.
Postmodernism’s urban planning marked a shift away from the large-scale

(and destructive) urban renewal schemes of the late 1950s through the 1970s. Whereas
modernist planning often demanded a tabula rasa, relying on data sets and rational
efficiencies to produce plans at a macro level, postmodern urbanism concerned itself
with the individual’s experience of the city at the human level (the subject which
continually preoccupied Moore). When the project began, Horton Plaza’s
redevelopment belonged to the former type of redevelopment, suggesting a wholesale
clearance of the six-block site. As designed by Jerde, a more postmodern pedestrian-
centered urbanism developed.
If modernism hoped to establish order within the city through infrastructure,
postmodernism attempted to address problems of placelessness and banality created
by these modern urban environments. 63 The movement renewed an interest in historic
62 Stern, 37.
63
Nan Ellin, Postmodern Urbanism, Revised Edition (New York: Princeton
Architectural Press, 1996), 155.
50
urban contexts and in the role of architecture in forming vital public places. 64
Influenced by the publication of activist Jane Jacobs’ (1916-2006) The Death and Life
of Great American Cities in 1961, which lambasted the urban planners and bureaucrats
who failed to recognize citizens’ ability to make their own form of “organized
complexity,” postmodern planners favored a people-centered approach to design. 65
Even when he participated in urban renewal schemes, as at his Church Street
South public housing development in New Haven developed between 1966 and 1969,
Moore stridently opposed the aggressive schemes from planners he derided as
“bulldozer and urban renewal people,” whom he argued were engaged in a “version of
criminal rape that I’m not in favor of.” 66 He preferred using David Lewis’ term “urban
tinkerers.” Working on a shoestring budget at Church Street South, Moore created
human-scaled courtyards and places to linger by placing his standard unit blocks in
irregular ways. He also hoped each resident would paint their own doors and walls and
plant front gardens to add variety to the scheme. Moore felt city planning and
downtown renewal efforts should
Start from the conventions—houses and streets and squares and city
halls and things that people recognize—and diddle with them, improve
them in ways that don’t tear up the fabric, but try to mend and extend,
starting with the familiar and carefully adding surprise. 67
64
Margaret Crawford, “The Architect and the Mall,” in You Are Here: The Jerde
Partnership International (London: Phaidon Press Limited, 1999), 45.
65Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Random
House, 1961).
66 Keim, xxiv.
67 Keim, xxiv.
51
2018. MLTW/Moore-Turnbull with Marvin Buchanan and Donald
Whitaker, New Haven, Connecticut. As originally conceived, the
concrete screen walls and individual entries featured colorful
supergraphics. New Haven Preservation Trust - Karin Krochmal.

2018. MLTW, New Haven, Connecticut. New Haven Preservation Trust
- Karin Krochmal.
52
2018. MLTW, New Haven, Connecticut. Concrete screen walls,
originally featuring supergraphics, frame views into a court with
decorative paving. New Haven Preservation Trust - Karin Krochmal.
Like Moore in New Haven, Jerde was hired after most of the land for the
project had already been cleared and he could not approach the redevelopment of the
site as an “urban tinkerer.” Instead, Jerde would attempt to create a simulacrum of the
idealized urban street within the mall and break down the mass of the mall’s
superstructure with a variety of street facing façades.
Jon Jerde and the Commercial Turn of Postmodernism
While the articles, buildings, and teaching of Moore and the early
postmodernists were influential in the academy and among young architects, the
postmodern movement greatly expanded its mass appeal in the 1980s. As art,
literature, fashion, and design became increasingly commercialized and commodified
53
in the 1980s—the “Designer Decade”—architects and developers took
postmodernism’s early ideals and applied them to new realms of aesthetic practice,
including the mall. Horton Plaza was commercial postmodernism at the exact moment
postmodernism was becoming commercialized, and its 1985 opening marked
postmodernism’s shift away from the academy and into popular culture.
Important in this shift was the 1980 Venice Biennale and its International
Architecture Exhibition, The Presence of the Past, a landmark show marking the
transition of postmodern architecture from an extended series of experiments toward a
movement with defined structure and codified manner. The central exhibition, Strada
Novissima, featured a row of façades by twenty major architects and offices of the
day, including Moore, Venturi Rauch & Scott Brown, Stern, Gehry, Michael Graves
(1934-2015), Rem Koolhaas (b. 1944), and Arata Isozaki (b. 1931), creating an
“extremely new street.” The façades featured an enormous variety of architectural
elements, conceits, and materials, and used history and wit to convey individual
messages about the state of architecture. As architect Terry Farrell later summarized,
To walk down the Strada Novissima was an extraordinary experience:

like a shopping mall, with different shops representing different
architects, but all agreeing on at least one thing—that performance,
individuality, and theatricality were the right way to show their
wares. 68
68
Farrell and Furman, 30.
54
Figure 29 Study for Charles W. Moore’s façade along the Strada Novissima, ca.
1980. © Charles Moore Foundation.
Figure 30 View along the Strada Novissima in the Corderie Arsenale, 1980.
Façade designs, from left to right, by Robert A. M. Stern; Charles W.
Moore; Ricardo Bofill; Paolo Portoghesi, Francesco Cellini, & Claudio
D’Amato; and Office of Metropolitan Architecture (Rem Koolhaas),
Venice, Italy. © Charles Moore Foundation.
Following the Biennale and wider exposure to postmodernism more generally,
the style took on a more legible identity: architects, clients, and the public
acknowledged postmodernism as the dominant, accepted style.

Postmodernism’s popular turn also signaled a shift toward the commercial,
with design of the 1980s characterized by
vivid color, theatricality, and exaggeration: everything…a style

statement. Whether surfaces were glossy, faked, or deliberately
55
distressed, they reflected the desire to combine subversive statements
with commercial appeal. 69
The combination of wealth, style, and market value influenced those practicing within
the postmodern ethos, leading to the rise of “starchitects”—where the architect himself
or herself became a commodity—and a tighter connection between architecture and
commerce. Whether buying architect-designed home goods through retailers like
Alessi or Swid Powell, or shopping in a mall whose architecture reflected the major
architectural trends like Horton Plaza, the relationship between architecture and retail
became increasingly entwined through the 1980s.
The willingness of Hahn and city leaders to execute a postmodern scheme was
undoubtedly influenced by the public becoming more aware of and interested in
popular forms of postmodernism. Moore declared that “I see architecture as having a
primary function of making its inhabitants feel as though they are inhabiting
something as they are someplace and therefore somebody,” and postmodernism’s
vocabulary had the diversity and expansiveness to accommodate ideas of what makes
a place feel significant. Moore’s architecture was not concerned solely with form, but
with the activity that it housed and the associations it evoked. Horton Plaza would
continue this interest within a new typology by using planning, materials, and
allusions familiar to Moore’s work to recreate the bustle and joy of a European street
in the heart of downtown San Diego.
69
“Postmodernism: About the Exhibition,” Victoria & Albert Museum, Accessed
March 20, 2020, http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/exhibitions/postmodernism/about-the-
exhibition/.
56
Chapter 3
VICTOR GRUEN, THE MALL, AND THE CITY
As much as Horton Plaza’s aesthetic is indebted to Charles Moore, its
typology—the downtown mall—can be traced to the pioneering Austrian-American
architect Victor Gruen (1903-1980) and his vision for shopping centers as generators
of urban renewal. The form-giver of the modern shopping mall, Gruen had ambitions
for his malls to become civic and community centers for both booming postwar
suburbs and struggling postwar cities. Like Moore, Gruen was concerned about what
he saw as the lack of meaningful civic places being built in America. Gruen believed
technological advances and growing wealth would lead to decentralized populations,
increased leisure time, and an attendant need for a new form of town squares. Gruen’s
ideas of building community through the physical construction of retail centers
dovetailed with Moore’s interest in how public space might be paid for by society, and
what the architect’s role was as creator of place. Horton Plaza unites these two major
forces of the midcentury built environment.
After World War II, the rapid growth of the suburbs caused a radical decline in
American urban retail and commercial life, including the closure of many once-grand
downtown department stores that had served as the retail heart of cities since the turn
of the century. Although business and civic leaders who favored strong downtowns
fought against economic, technological, and social developments that heavily favored
growth in the suburbs, forces favoring suburban expansion overpowered the central
city’s ability to retain its monopoly on shopping. Urban development and retail
historians Bernard Frieden and Lynne Sagalyn write that “the circumstances that
undermined central business districts were as complex and mutually reinforcing as
57
those that had led to their creation.” 70 These forces included changes in housing and
jobs, race relations, and modes of public and private transportation, all of which were
present in San Diego and worked against the idea of a downtown mall in the planning
stages of Horton Plaza.
This chapter outlines Victor Gruen’s writings and designs for shopping centers,
including their use as tools for urban regeneration. It also includes a brief study of two
landmark non-traditional retail developments of the 1960s, Ghirardelli Square in San
Francisco and Faneuil Hall Marketplace in Boston, which helped pave the way for
Horton Plaza’s unique form and atmosphere. Finally, the chapter reviews the
challenges facing developers and cities interested in building downtown malls in the
early 1980s.
Victor Gruen’s Vision of Retail and the City
Although Victor Gruen is acknowledged as the inventor of the mall, his
interest in designing shopping centers lay in their power to redefine the contemporary
city. Indeed, for Gruen the ideal shopping center was synonymous with the ideal
city. 71 Though he designed over forty-four million square feet of retail space in his
career, he was interested in shopping primarily as a vessel to create a new civic realm.
He did not separate the two: “Shopping centers have taken on the characteristics of
70
71Sze Tsung Leong, “Gruen Urbanism: Mall as Urbanism,” in Harvard Design School
Guide to Shopping, ed. Chuihua Judy Chung, Jeffrey Inaba, Rem Koolhaas, Sze Tsung
Leong, (Koln: Taschen, 2001), 381.
58
urban organisms serving a multitude of human needs and activities, thus justifying the
designation: SHOPPING TOWNS.” 72
Gruen believed malls could and should accommodate all the functions
traditionally associated with the city, insisting that “shopping centers become,
increasingly, multi-purpose town centers.” 73 The mall in Gruen’s conception joined
the lineage of retail coequal to city centers:
By affording opportunities for social life and recreation in a protected

pedestrian environment, by incorporating civic and educational
facilities, shopping centers can fill an existing void. They can provide
the needed place and opportunity for participation in modern
community life that the ancient Greek Agora, the Medieval Market
Place and our own Town Squares provided in the past. 74
This idealized vision of the town square was realized by Gruen in 1956 when
he opened the world’s first fully enclosed and climate-controlled mall, Southdale
Shopping Center, in the Minneapolis suburb of Edina. Two anchor department stores
sat opposite each other along a two-story, sky-lit hall lined with smaller shops. 75
Within this central space, which Gruen called the “Garden Court of Perpetual Spring,”
shoppers were invited to dine under patio umbrellas at the “sidewalk” café, enjoy the
goldfish pond and aviary, and socialize among sculpture, decorative lighting, and
72 VictorGruen and Larry Smith, Shopping Towns USA: The Planning of Shopping
Centers (New York: Reinhold, 1960), 11.
73 Victor Gruen, “Recipe for the Ideal Shopping Center,” Stores, January 1963.
74 Gruen and Smith, 24.
75This model, of two department stores connected by an open or enclosed pedestrian
way lined with smaller shops, came to be known in the retail industry as the dumbbell
plan and was the essential form of many thousands of later malls.
59
festive textiles. Southdale incorporated further non-retail aspects of the city in the
mall, including a post office, and Gruen’s master plan for the site included a medical
center, schools, offices, and residences.
Figure 31 Southdale Shopping Center, 1956. Victor Gruen, Edina, Minnesota.

View of the central court with Harry Bertoia sculpture at left. Rights
provided by ArtStor, data source from University of Georgia Libraries,
Record 116465.
Gruen not only saw the mall as an evolved form of the traditional town center,
but also as a solution to the problems of traffic, crime, lack of investment, and
disorganization within existing cities. 76 As often as he wrote or lectured on shopping
76 Leong, 384.
60
center designs, he discussed the decline of the city, describing the situation variously
as “the urban crisis,” “the mess that constitutes our urban environment,” or “the chaos
of congestion, this anarchy of scatteration.” 77
Convinced that shopping centers could “bring order, stability, and meaning to
chaotic suburbia,” Gruen saw his ideal mall as the base unit of town and regional
planning. 78 As he explained in Shopping Towns USA:
No democratic society can flourish without law and order which, when
applied to the physical environment, necessitates planning. In a
complex and highly mechanized society environmental planning
safeguards the basic human rights. By providing the best conditions for
physical and mental health, it protects life. By establishing barriers
against anarchy and the infringements of hostile natural and man-made
forces, it protects liberty. By the creation of a humane environment it
invites and encourages the pursuit of happiness. 79
He concludes that “The shopping center which can do more than fulfill
practical shopping needs, the one that will afford an opportunity for cultural, social,
civic and recreational activities will reap the greatest benefits.” 80 Far more than
commercial enterprises, for Gruen the mall could redefine American life.
How could malls solve the problems plaguing the city? Gruen felt that “the
lesson learned and the experience gained in the planning of regional shopping centers
77Victor Gruen, “New Forms of Community,” in Who Designs America? ed.

Laurence B. Holland (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1966), 172; Gruen, “New
Forms of Community,” 172; Victor Gruen, The Heart of Our Cities (New York:
Simon and Schuster, 1964), 66.
61
will contribute immeasurably to the successful carrying out of this task [of revitalizing
cities].” 81 As Gruen understood shopping centers as distilled and coordinated civic
entities, reinvigorating downtowns could be carried out through malls as “the same
planning principles apply to both urban and suburban centers.” Downtown shopping
centers, Gruen wrote, would:
• safeguard surrounding areas against blight

• expose retail facilities to maximum foot traffic
• separate various mechanized traffic types from each
other and from foot traffic
• create a maximum of comfort and convenience for
shoppers and merchants
• achieve orderliness, unity, and beauty 82
Gruen’s solution involved surgically implanting the suburban mall into the
urban core, where “the desire of shoppers for a quieter, safer, more restful
environment” would be met, and struggling city centers would be saved by becoming
more suburban. 83 As he wrote:
A new kind of shopping center has appeared; the urban shopping

center, in which the downtown area—father of all commercial
centers—translates lessons from the suburban children into the
downtown vernacular. 84
These hopes of order, profit, comfort, and safety mirror the hopes of San
Diego’s leaders in bringing a mall to the Horton Plaza site. Yet despite his conviction

83Victor Gruen, “Retailing and the Automobile,” in Stores and Shopping Centers, ed.
James S. Hornbeck (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1962), 111.
84 Gruen, “Retailing and the Automobile,” 108.
62
and faith in the shopping center, in his own career Gruen did not produce a mall that
successfully and sustainably reinvented a downtown. Two notable attempts by Gruen,
Kalamazoo’s pedestrianized street mall of 1957 and Rochester’s Midtown Plaza of
1962, both opened to great public fanfare and critical praise yet failed to remain viable
as either retail enterprises or town squares.
In Kalamazoo, Gruen’s plan involved closing stretches of existing city streets
through the retail district to automobile traffic and adding coordinating landscaping,
benches, water features, and lighting. Replicated in hundreds of downtowns
throughout the 1960s and 1970s, these pedestrianized malls almost universally failed
to live up to expectations. Most cities were unable to add enough (or any) new parking
to allow downtown pedestrian malls to rival the ample free parking found at suburban
centers. As assemblages of different privately-owned businesses, few districts had the
coordinated shop hours, uniform design aesthetic, carefully selected and located
variety of shops, or meticulous maintenance found in the suburban mall. Instead of a
sustained revival of downtown shopping, the closing of the streets led to the shuttering
of established businesses and sped up the decline of retail cores. 85 The failure of
Kalamazoo’s pedestrian mall proved to be one of a handful of case studies proving
Gruen’s philosophy of cities as shopping centers could not be half-baked, but required
more major physical interventions.
85
Frieden and Sagalyn, 77. Including pedestrian malls in Boston, Toledo, and Seattle.
63
Figure 32 Postcard views of Burdick Street Pedestrian Mall/Kalamazoo Mall,
1957. Victor Gruen, Kalamazoo, Michigan. William Bird on Flickr (CC
BY-NC-ND 2.0).
Rochester’s Midtown Plaza opened in 1962 as the first true urban indoor
shopping mall in the country and brought the clean-lined modernism and orderly
interior world of the suburban mall downtown. Again, Gruen incorporated artwork,
seating, fountains, and landscaping into the central court of the mall, which he
intended to function as an all-seasons town square for winter-weary Rochester. Here,

Gruen’s ideas of bringing together diverse functions within a shopping center were
realized, with a large auditorium, office tower, hotel, and restaurant joining the mall’s
retail and parking.
64
Figure 33 Section, Midtown Plaza, 1964. Victor Gruen, Rochester, New York.
John Reps Papers, #15-2-1101. Division of Rare and Manuscript
Collections, Cornell University Library. Creative Commons Attribution
4.0 International License (CC-BY).
Figure 34 Midtown Plaza, 1964. Victor Gruen, Rochester, New York. Interior
court with clock by Gere Kavanaugh. John Reps Papers, #15-2-1101.
Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University
Library. Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-
BY).
65
While Midtown Plaza stood as the fullest realization of Gruen’s idealized
shopping center-as-city center, the project had been a struggle to develop and strained
to turn a profit. Midtown Plaza was followed in the late-1960s and early-1970s by a
series of downtown malls in midsized American cities that proved downtown malls
were possible, but difficult to realize. 86 Community and retailers’ concerns about
crime, nighttime safety, and the homeless were present at every stage of development,
as were shifting tides of opposition and support from citizens and existing businesses.
Delays due to assembling land, attracting developers, and signing tenants caused some
downtown malls to take ten or more years to be realized, compared to the one or two
years needed to complete most suburban malls. The architecture of many of these
projects was boxy, unornamented, and functional. Missing was the dedication to art
and communal space found in Gruen’s best designs and any of the fantasy and
placemaking that Charles Moore was arguing for at the time.
In its most ambitious form, San Diego’s Horton Plaza redevelopment project
would act on Gruen’s theories of the retail center as civic square and catalyst for
downtown renewal. At a larger scale than anything Gruen built, and in a radically
different aesthetic, Horton Plaza was to be an encapsulation of downtown itself: not
only shopping, but theaters and nightlife, hotels and apartments, and office towers
were to coexist in the city-within-a-city superstructure. If it could avoid the struggles
of other downtown malls in the development process and operation, Horton Plaza
would realize Gruen’s grander vision of the shopping center as civic form.
86Frieden and Sagalyn, 84-85. Significant downtown malls were built in New Haven,
Bridgeport, New Rochelle, Buffalo, Worcester, Salt Lake City, Sacramento, and San
Bernardino.
66
The Mall Developers’ Myopic Vision of Gruen’s Grand Plans
Gruen’s writings on shopping centers and his highly successful suburban
projects were quickly codified by industry groups and developers, who, less interested
in Gruen’s community building theories, transformed the process of mall building into
a lucrative and singularly suburban enterprise. Frustrated, Gruen abandoned the form
he helped to create and returned to his hometown, Vienna, in 1968. In 1978 he
disavowed being the “father” of the shopping mall, saying “I refuse to pay alimony to
those bastard developments. They destroyed our cities.” 87 Yet, his creation continued
to spread at a rapid pace across the American suburbs.
By the late 1960s, developers had mastered a standard planning and financing
model for creating a suburban mall that lenders, insurers, department store executives,
and national tenants accepted and supported, producing a homogeneous mall product
coast to coast. 88 Building a regional mall was rule-driven, with formulas codified by
industry groups designed to minimize guesswork and maximize profits per square
foot. The architect, then, became only one player among a network of experts: real-
estate brokers, financial and market analysts, economists, merchandisers, engineers,
transportation planners, interior designers, and local government agencies and political
factions, and it was not the role of the architect to disrupt or innovate outside of the
87Anne Quito, “The father of the American shopping mall hated what he created,”
Outlets, Quartz, July 17, 2015, https://qz.com/454214/the-father-of-the-american-
shopping-mall-hated-cars-and-suburban-sprawl/.
88
Regina Lee Blaszcyk, American Consumer Society, 1865-2005: From Hearth to
HDTV (Wheeling, IL: Harlan Davidson, Inc., 2009), 206-208; Frances Anderton, You
Are Here: The Jerde Partnership International (London: Phaidon Press Limited,
1999), 13.
67
known formulas. 89 The design of most malls reflected this reliance on precedent, data,
and profit potential over unique visual pleasure, with most malls consisting of simple
exteriors of unadorned forms, surrounded by parking, enclosing interior promenades
where interest was found less in the architecture than in the shopfronts and the items
on sale.
Charles Moore was biting in his critique of the standard suburban shopping
center. He did not find in the form any of the redeeming qualities of town squares or
civic centers. Instead, he saw the opposite of Gruen’s initial hopes for creating public
space in the suburbs. As Moore told an interviewer in 1991, he believed that:
…shopping malls have moved the scene of activity from the towns to
suburban locations where they are making profits for some developers,
but the new locations are simply not as public as downtowns were, not
as interesting, and have no connection with our past or with any kind of
continuous activity that lets us have a sense of where we are and who
we are, and how we might connect with someplace…The longing is
there on people’s part for a village with some intimate situation that the
people can all feel a part of, which they can’t do with your typical
shopping mall because it doesn’t include anything but shopping. 90
Moore’s critique reflected malls as they developed, not as Gruen had
idealistically envisioned them. Gruen’s arguments for saving downtowns through
shopping centers and Moore’s insistence on architecture’s necessity to create
meaningful places were developing concurrently, but the two architects’ theories never
met. Gruen, the European-born, financially successful head of a large national firm,
and Moore, the romantic academic, eclectic thinker, and head of multiple small
89
Jerry Jacobs, The Mall: An Attempted Escape from Everyday Life (Prospect Heights,
IL: Waveland Press, Inc., 1984), 39-62.
90 Moore and Luxemburg, 328.
68
offices, did not combine their ideas into a project. That combination came,
unwittingly, with Jon Jerde at Horton Plaza.
Downtown Retail Alternatives: Adaptive Reuse and Festival Marketplaces
Though indebted to Gruen’s theory of the shopping center as urban center, Jon
Jerde also brought to Horton Plaza the influence of unique and successful
developments that expanded the idea of what a downtown mall could be. Two years
after Gruen’s Midtown Plaza opened with its modernist form and clear remove from
the historic fabric of Rochester, a radically different urban shopping center opened on
the other side of the country: Ghirardelli Square. This adaptive reuse project helped
launch a new genre of retail centers: the festival marketplace. While suburban malls
transplanted to the city achieved middling successes in the 1960s and early-1970s,
Ghirardelli Square in San Francisco showed an alternative roadmap to success
downtown. Horton Plaza would not have existed without these innovative advances on
the mall’s form beyond Gruen’s modernist vocabulary.
69
Figure 35 Ghirardelli Square, 1964. William Wurster of Wurster, Bernardi and
Emmons, San Francisco, California. Wikimedia via Towerman86, GNU
Free Documentation License, Version 1.2.
Ghirardelli Square occupied a group of red brick factory and office buildings
constructed for the Ghirardelli Chocolate Company, which left the complex in the
early 1960s. On the factory campus were some of the oldest buildings in San
Francisco, and locals were concerned about the likely demolition of the site for
apartment blocks. Shipping executive and past president of the San Francisco Planning
and Urban Renewal Association William Roth purchased the site with the principal
intention of preserving the factory buildings. Working with architects Wurster,
Bernardi and Emmons, the complex was converted into a shopping and entertainment
district christened Ghirardelli Square and opened to great fanfare in 1964. William
Wurster’s design celebrates the rambling brick buildings and historic features while
70
deftly incorporating new amenities, including landscaping by Lawrence Halprin and
graphics by Barbara Stauffacher Solomon.
The popularity of the project demonstrated that a diverse collection of shops in
a unique environment could draw a wide public to a downtown site, even without
anchor department stores. Indeed, the layout of the square operated against many of
the understood properties of a successful mall: instead of a linear shopping concourse,
circulation rambled, climbing stairs and going through narrow passageways or open
plazas to give the shopper a sense of discovery as they moved through the mall. Roth
understood the importance of parking to the success of the center and constructed a
ten-level garage underneath the complex at significant expense. Further expenses were
incurred in the architectural details, executed with rigorous attention to craftsmanship
and toward an overarching theme of urban luxury.
The development and its attention to detail attracted the positive attention of
Charles Moore, who reviewed the project for Architectural Forum in 1965. Moore
observed that the renovation had to have been considerably more labor intensive and
expensive than simply clearing the site, but that in a city “which highly prizes its short
past” the rehabilitation created a special place. Patronized by locals and tourists alike,
Moore commented on the “the aura of success” the project embodied. He credited this
success to the efforts of its “public-spirited citizen” developer, Roth, and the
architecture, landscape, and graphics from Wurster, Halprin, and Stauffacher
Solomon. 91
91Charles Moore, “Ghirardelli Square,” Architectural Forum 122, no. 3 (June 1965),
reprinted in Keim, 146-147.
71
For Moore, Ghirardelli’s successes include “not being led inexorably past
every shop in the place on the way to every other. There is high adventure in even
finding some of the upper-floor enterprises.” 92 Moore attributes Ghirardelli Square’s
feeling of opulence in part to the invisible details of the conversion that compliment
but do not overpower the historic structures. He acknowledged these details came at a
high cost to Roth, and argued Ghirardelli Square possessed a “particularly impressive
kind of opulence, rising above those economic urgencies” which limit so much
commercial architecture. 93
Moore concluded his review by acknowledging the non-architectural features
behind the success of the complex, reflecting his belief that architecture exists not as
pure form but as a placemaking art. After crediting the developer, the designers who
“walked the thin line between gaiety and coyness,” Moore offered “a minimum
amount of credit might be begrudged to the ten-level garage which underlies the
whole,” introducing economic feasibility to the success of the project above. Yet, for
Moore:
Far more [credit for success] goes to the distinguished merchandise that
is to be seen in the shops, and to the supporting activities that are most
carefully and unspontaneously arranged (such as Cinco de Mayo
celebrations). Finally, perhaps the largest share of all should go to the
San Francisco Bay. The great triumph of Ghirardelli Square is that it
makes the most of being on it. 94
92 Moore, “Ghirardelli,” 147.

93 Moore, “Ghirardelli,” 147.
94 Moore, “Ghirardelli,” 146-147.
72
Moore identified site, merchandise, and programming, along with parking,
detailing, investment, preservation, and sense of discovery, as complementary and
vital components that come together to build a successful shopping center. While
some parts overlapped with the formulas perfected by retail industry groups in the
suburbs, others did not. Site, preservation, and the sense of discovery are what
ultimately defined and distinguished Ghirardelli Square from its suburban
contemporaries, and these qualities are what Jon Jerde would attempt to replicate at
Horton Plaza.
Ghirardelli Square inspired several similar adaptive reuse retail projects around
the country, often led by citizens concerned with historic preservation and developed
by local merchants, but the typology was most successfully and sensationally executed
in 1976 when the Rouse Company opened its conversion of Boston’s Faneuil Hall as
an urban-mall and street-celebration. 95 Defining the genre of festival marketplaces,
architect Benjamin Thompson reworked landmarked buildings from the 1740s and
1820s into a cheerful mall and tourist attraction. 96 Within Faneuil Hall, Quincy
Market, and adjoining structures, unique local shops and first-to-market national
chains were assembled in a repurposed, controlled, and planned environment that
opened seamlessly to the streets of Boston. Thompson incorporated modifications in

tune with and playing off against existing architectural rhythms. His skillful use of
95These include architect Joseph Eshrick’s designs for The Cannery, also in San
Francisco, and Trolley Square in Salt Lake City and Larimer Square in Denver.
96
Nicholas Dagen Bloom, Merchant of Illusion: James Rouse, America’s Salesman of
the Businessman’s Utopia (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2004); William S.
Kowinski, The Malling of America: An Inside look at the Great Consumer Paradise
(New York: William Morrow, 1985), 289-301.
73
color, texture, landscaping, and attention to detail produced a complete environment
that was pleasurable, easy to participate in, and connected to the imagination of
Boston as America’s colonial center. Faneuil Hall Marketplace was a financial and
popular hit and signaled the entrance of major developers into the previously localized
genre of downtown adaptive reuse retail.
Figure 36 Quincy Market at Faneuil Hall Marketplace, 1976. Benjamin

Thompson Associates, Boston, Massachusetts. Digital Initiatives at
Rhode Island College. Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-
No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
74
Boston, Massachusetts. Photograph 1993. Wikimedia user Stilfehler,
GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2.

Boston, Massachusetts. Notice the kiosks selling local crafts and goods.
Photograph by Chester Smolski. Digital Initiatives at Rhode Island
College. Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative
Works 4.0 License.
75
Hahn would learn from these projects the importance of having unique, local
shops at Horton Plaza, while Jerde would see the impact that richly layered urban
space had on the shopping experience. Jerde would borrow from the suburban mall the
use of multiple department store anchors and ample parking, and pair it with Roth and
Rouse’s rejection of architectural homogeneity in favor of local character. With
Charles Moore’s theory of placemaking and architectural forms, Horton Plaza would
attempt to combine Gruen’s formula for revitalizing downtown through a major retail
center with the festival marketplace’s clear celebration of a place’s history and
architecture, to create a mall that successfully functioned as both a profitable
enterprise and community gathering place.
Problems Facing the Development of Urban Malls in the 1980s
In 1985, Horton Plaza opened in a moment of great optimism for the
downtown mall within the retail industry. Between 1970 and 1988, over one hundred
new downtown retail centers opened in American cities. While some were festival
marketplaces and consisted of unique locations, specialty shops, and lacked
department stores, the most ambitious downtown projects were built to compete
directly against suburban malls. This was not an easy task. As Frieden and Sagalyn
summarized in 1988, in order to be competitive, downtown malls “required elaborate
city help to get started, and they demanded the fullest range of public and private
strategies to deal with problems along the way.” Transplanting the mall downtown
posed tough problems and high risk; “everything that was easy to do in the suburbs
was hard to do downtown.” 97 The decade of development, design, and delay in
97
76
realizing Horton Plaza was a case in point. Issues working against urban malls in
general, and Horton Plaza specifically, fell into three categories: structural,
bureaucratic, and financial.
Along with the high cost of land and land clearance, the concern for parking
made many developers write-off urban malls as a pipe dream. Central business
districts, considered the most logical place for downtown mall developments,
demanded expensive vertical parking arrangements. For the mall itself to be built taller
and shopping concourses to rise multiple stories, more passenger and freight elevators,
escalators, and larger structural components were required, increasing construction
and operational costs. 98
Added to these expenses was the complex relationship between the developer
who wanted to build downtown and the city government itself: help was usually
needed to assemble a site large enough for a mall among small urban parcels. City
officials were also required to work with the developer on traffic improvements and
infrastructure, and to help guide the project through the bureaucracy of building
downtown. 99
Finally, department stores provided important guarantees for developers to
secure financing to build malls, yet department stores had been leaving their historic
center city locations behind in favor of the suburbs since the 1950s and 1960s. If they
were essential for financing a mall, and yet were closing or divesting in their
downtown presence in favor of virtually guaranteed suburban success, what
98
Frieden and Sagalyn, 74-77.
99
Frieden and Sagalyn, 74-77.
77
motivation did department store executives have to work towards building in a
downtown mall? 100 Banks, relying on industry standards written for the suburbs, were
leery of supporting mall projects without department store guarantees.
Horton Plaza faced all these issues, leading to delays in its development and
forcing changes to its physical form. Horton Plaza operated at the scale parallel to that
of a superregional suburban mall yet sat on a tight downtown site. Beyond these
issues, urban planning had undergone a radical shift in thinking since Gruen first
proposed the shopping center as a solution to the city’s ills. The top-down ideals of
1960s planning that involved the wholesale clearance of swaths of downtown through
eminent domain had lost popularity and political support, yet Horton Plaza began as a
product of that thinking. Could its architecture serve to combat the attendant
placelessness of so many urban renewal projects?
100 Frieden and Sagalyn, 74-77.
78
Chapter 4
THE DESIGN AND EXPERIENCE OF HORTON PLAZA
To realize Charles Moore’s demand that the architect’s role is to create
meaningful places, and to manifest Victor Gruen’s theories of malls as urban
regenerators, Jon Jerde’s design for Horton Plaza combined disparate streams of
architecture, urban planning, and retail theory into something totally new.
This chapter traces the evolution of the mall’s design and approval, followed
by a close reading of Horton Plaza’s architecture and its relationship to Moore’s

design principles. It subsequently studies the experience of mall visitors, and how the
complex successfully creates a richly layered, cinematic experience of space.
Redesigning the Redevelopment
While Jon Jerde was given significant creative control of the Horton Plaza
project, his initial commission from Hahn was not to start designing from scratch but
instead to rework Frank Hope’s proposed mall that had been panned by the CCDC.
Jerde, who had left Kober Associates in 1976, set up his own architectural office
expressly to undertake Horton Plaza. 101 Revisions to the rejected Hope proposal were
completed by December 1977, and this first Jerde plan again called for an enclosed
mall atop a parking structure, while adding an ice-skating rink, hotel, restaurants,
residential apartments, office space, and a rooftop recreational facility. 102
101
Gordon, 70.
102 Sadly, Jon Jerde’s death in February 2015, a dispute concerning the archives of his
early work, and a relocation of his office, The Jerde Partnership, did not allow me to
visit the Jerde records concerning Horton Plaza. The timeline presented here is based
on contemporary accounts and other sources as noted, however, future scholarship will
79
Figure 39 Early rendering for an enclosed Horton Plaza mall, ca. 1977-1981.
Jon Jerde Partnership. Image provided by The Jerde Partnership, Inc.
After Jerde’s initial plan was again rejected by CCDC, the architect spent time
exploring downtown San Diego in what he described as an attempt to get a “feel” of
the area. Instead of raising the mall above street level on a plinth of parking, Jerde
proposed opening the mall directly onto the city streets. He told reporters in 1979 that
likely reveal a deeper understanding about the design process and timeline of the
development of Horton Plaza mall.
80
his reworked mall design would be so contextual to the surroundings that, “when
we’re all done, you won’t know that this didn’t exist before.” 103
1981 proved to be a pivotal year in the mall’s development as Jerde adjusted
the design to accommodate the requirements of newly signed tenants, the demands of
local art and preservation groups, and new demands from the city. In spring of that
year, Hahn signed on an additional three department stores, bringing the total anchor
tenants to five and forcing Jerde to propose stacking two department stores on top of
each other. This unconventional move caused the mall height to increase from four
stories to five in height. 104 The idea of stacking two department stores was anathema
to accepted mall design, in which anchor tenants traditionally demand main-level
entrances and windows in which to display goods. Jerde therefore needed to design the
mall concourse in such a way as to encourage shoppers to venture to the upper levels.
Also in 1981, Hahn agreed to establish a fine arts budget of one million dollars
for public art in and around the mall, a concession to critics who said that the
developer was replacing interesting old buildings with a sterile monolith. Jerde was
directed by Hahn to work directly with the CCDC’s newly formed Arts Advisory
Board on the incorporation of artwork into the mall. 105 Jerde carefully selected artists
whose work complemented and enhanced the architectural program.
103
Roger Showley, “Architects Ready to Fill the Hole in San Diego’s Heart,” San
Diego Union, July 23, 1979.
104
Gordon, 108.
105
Gordon, 117.
81
Meanwhile, Hahn faced mounting pressure to save or incorporate some
remaining historic buildings into the development. In the 1972 site study, the planners
recommended the preservation of three structures: the 1915 Spreckels Building, the
1924 Balboa Theater, and the 1913 Golden West Hotel (designed by Frank Lloyd
Wright’s son, John Wright). 106 Hahn protested that preservation would be too costly
and too difficult to build around, and the first schemes for the mall proposed clearing
the entire site. But in 1981, the local preservation group Save Our Heritage
Organization successfully lobbied the city to demand Hahn save the Balboa Theater
and Golden West Hotel, forcing Jerde to work the mall around these two projects. 107
Hahn then leaned on Jerde to promote the preservation plans at public forums as a way
of currying favor for the mall project.
Unresolved were the fates of other buildings on the site (some of which had
been added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1980) that community
activists argued were worthy of preservation: the Lyceum, Cabrillo, and Plaza
theaters, Horton Grand Hotel, Brooklyn Kahle Saddlery, and the Bradley building.
Eventually, the run-down, all-night theaters were demolished, and community leaders
successfully lobbied Hahn to include a 450-seat theater and smaller black box theater
in the mall to replace the lost Lyceum, which operated as San Diego’s only mid-sized
repertory theater. 108 The Horton Grand Hotel and the Saddlery were dismantled and
106
Coffelt, “The City is Dead.”
107
Gordon, 21.
108 Gordon, 101-102.
82
reassembled nearby by a local entrepreneur, and the Bradley building was demolished,
but not before Jerde had plaster casts of its façade made for reuse at the mall.
As part of further negotiations with city leaders, Hahn agreed to include more
parking in the development, forcing Jerde to again reshape thousands of square feet of
retail space to allow room for the second parking structure. The increase in parking,
saving the Balboa Theater and Golden West Hotel, and the addition of two new
theaters resulted in an increasingly compact mall set atop the theaters and reaching to
a full fifth-floor shopping concourse, not simply one five-story department store.
The most important moment in the mall’s design development occurred in late
1981, when Hahn instructed Jerde to “take the lid off” the mall and employ whatever
means necessary to give Horton Plaza an “attractive, exciting atmosphere.” 109 This
instruction was taken literally (removing the roof) and figuratively (radical design
departure). In making Horton Plaza an open-air shopping center, Hahn broke with the
industry-accepted belief that shoppers wanted climate-controlled shopping
environments, and instead used San Diego’s temperate climate and sea breezes to his
advantage. Stylistically, Jerde began shedding much of the standardized mall aesthetic
he developed at Kober Associates in favor of exuberant postmodernism.
109
Gordon, 116.
83
Figure 40 Preliminary sketch for open-air Horton Plaza mall, ca. 1981. Jon
Jerde Partnership. The stacked department stores are entered via the
round tower at right. Image provided by The Jerde Partnership, Inc.
Figure 41 Preliminary sketch for open-air Horton Plaza mall, ca. 1981. Jon
Jerde Partnership. Image provided by The Jerde Partnership, Inc.
84
Figure 42 Preliminary drawing for open-air Horton Plaza mall, ca. 1981. Jon
Jerde Partnership. Here, the top floor dining concourse sits atop a
department store below. In the final design, the signage (which recalls
Ghirardelli Square’s landmark sign) and spires were not implemented.
Image provided by The Jerde Partnership, Inc.
As the development of the mall continued to slowly jump through legal and
financial hoops, Hahn, still under pressure from various interests in the city, pushed
his architect to make Horton Plaza a totally unique experience. In a 1982 memo, Hahn
directed Jerde: “This damn place should have as little resemblance to a typical
shopping center as possible. I don’t want to see a bench, a tree grate, a handrail or
85
anything else that has ever been used before. I want it utterly unique!” 110 Hahn, who
initially wanted the architecture to hew closely to suburban models in order to mitigate
potential alienation of the main suburban market, now argued that architecture should
be a main draw for shoppers to Horton Plaza over suburban centers.
Two decades past its initial conception and five years after Jerde joined the
project, at the time of the mall’s groundbreaking ceremony in October 1983 the design
of Horton Plaza mall was finally set. 111 Even with extensive concessions to
preservation, arts, and civic interest groups, there were still dissenting voices. The
president of the city’s Save Our Heritage Organization declared in a public hearing “I
am appalled by the arrogance of the architecture planned for the center; it is
disgusting.” According to a reporter at the same meeting, however, the overwhelming
sentiment was one of relief: work would finally begin on a site that had been
condemned through eminent domain more than a decade earlier. 112
Developing the Design
The architecture Jerde designed for Horton Plaza moves the shopper through a
sequence of unfolding events, and choreographs a sense of exploration and
anticipation. Before construction began, science fiction author Ray Bradbury
encapsulated the goals of Horton Plaza’s unusual design in an essay concerning the
110
Jon Jerde, Chief Architect for Horton Plaza, memorandum to Ernest W. Hahn and
John Gilchrist, September 13, 1982. (Jerde quotes Hahn in this memorandum) in
Gordon, 147.
111
Gordon, 133.
112
Gary Shaw, “Council delays Horton decision,” San Diego Evening Tribune,
September 29, 1981.
86
project, “The Aesthetics of Lostness.” It begins: “To be lost. How frightening. To be
safely lost. How wonderful.” The essay explores what makes European cities so
compelling to wander, and what makes the antique and junk shop so exciting for
children. It concludes by calling for a mall that allows anyone “the chance to ascend
into expectancy, the chance to descend into satisfaction and delight.” 113 Bradbury lays
out a schematic of the mall as “a plaza based on the principle of being lost and safe
and filled with joy.” 114 Jerde built Horton Plaza using Bradbury’s essay as his
touchstone, but he could just as easily have used Moore’s own writings. Both
Bradbury and Moore were interested in architecture’s ability to excite, to unfold, and
to hold the drama of everyday life. 115
113
Ray Bradbury, “The Aesthetics of Lostness,” Yestermorrow: Obvious Answers to
Impossible Futures (Santa Barbara: Capra Press, 1991), 45-48. At the same time Jerde
was working on Horton Plaza, he was meeting weekly with Bradbury. Both claim their
friendship sprung out of a desire for a better city, specifically a better Los Angeles.
Throughout the late-1970s and 80s, they met with other “artists, idealists, and
dreamers” in Jerde’s office, where, according to Bradbury they:
threw conversational confetti to the air and ran under to see how much
each of us caught...We blueprinted cities, malls and museums by the
triple dozen, threw them on the floor, stepped on them, and birthed
more with all three gabbing at once. I felt honored to be allowed in as
an amateur Palladio with my meagre experience but Futurist hopes.
From Ray Bradbury, “Free Pass at Heaven’s Gate,” You Are Here: The Jerde
Partnership International (London: Phaidon Press Limited, 1999), 7.
114
Bradbury, You Are Here, 7.
115
Peter Rowe, “San Diego’s aging Horton Plaza, once a landmark of urban design, is
losing luster and tenants,” The San Diego Union-Tribune, January 22, 2017,
https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/california/la-me-ln-horton-plaza-
20170120-story.html.
87
Figure 43 Model, Horton Plaza, ca. 1981-1982. Jerde Partnership. Model featured
on the cover of Dollars & Cents of Shopping Centers (Urban Land
Institute, 1984). Courtesy of Urban Land Institute.
88
Figure 44 Model, Horton Plaza, ca. 1981-1982. Jon Jerde Partnership. Photograph
by David Marshall.
89
Jerde’s description of the Horton Plaza design process reveals a very clear
attitude toward architectural design. When presenting the design to Hahn and the
CCDC, Jerde hired associates he described as “quirky, young designers and architects”
whom he called “experience makers” to help produce a large-scale model of Horton
Plaza. 116 As he described the process of building the model:
After the experience-making team got done, the upholstery team came
in and glued on the architecture, then came the team that made little
bake sales to imply life in this place. 117
The idea that Jerde “glued on the architecture” remains evident in the finished
project, and lends Horton Plaza both a sense of impermanence and a feeling of child-
like fantasy: that the architecture is formed like a craft project executed in a burst of
creative energy and spontaneity. At Horton Plaza, architecture functions like fantasy
or play.
Visually, this “glued on” architecture relates to the screen walls and creative
combinations of forms found in Moore’s work. Additionally (and perhaps more
importantly), the focus Jerde places on the life within the mall (through the bake sale)
speaks to Moore’s focus on architecture forming place. Jerde’s concern with the
unplanned life within the mall, it seems, parallels his concern with its architecture.
To introduce his unique design to city officials and the developer, Jerde staged
what he referred to as a “happening,” where he and his staff conducted a theatrical
debut of the mall’s painted cardboard model. Jerde and the team of “experience
116Frances Anderton interview with Jon Jerde, March 14, 1997 in Anderton, You Are
Here, 9.
117
Anderton, You Are Here, 9.
90
makers” erected a scaffolding around the model, tied up curtains, and “put everybody
in black turtlenecks and balaclavas and handheld spotlights. It was very corny, and
very dramatic.” 118
Jerde’s presentation style and colorful model mirrored the free spirit of
postmodernism’s beginnings, with its flirtation between the humorous and the
dramatic and its celebration of the drama of everyday life. The theatricality of the
presentation, the collage aesthetic of the model, and Jerde’s own descriptions of what
the project would be for San Diego suggested a celebration of city life and Venturi’s
“messy vitality” within a single, managed site. Jerde’s design was a figurative
representation of urban life packaged into an assertive sales pitch to the establishment
world of retail development and city leaders.
The logistical challenge facing Jerde involved fitting the familiar contents of a
regional mall, including parking, onto a small urban site. This demanded significant
spatial overlapping and rearrangement of each element: five department stores, over
one hundred smaller shops and restaurants, a live theater, and 2,400 parking spots.
Also to be considered was space and structural support for later additions of a hotel,
apartments, movie theater, or offices on the same site—in part, these additional uses of
the site dated back to the initial urban renewal plans approved by public referendum in
1972. They would diversify the function of the mall, creating a variation on Gruen’s
ideal shopping center-as-city center.
118
Anderton, You Are Here, 9.
91
Figure 45 Perspective drawing, Horton Plaza, ca. 1982-1985.
Yellow: Shopping armature and pedestrian pathways
Purple: Retail and restaurants
Orange: Department Stores
Light Blue: Multiplex Movie Theater (completed in 1986)
Red: Parking Structures
Blue: Hotel and conference center (completed in 1987)
Peach: Proposed offices (completed, as apartments, 1994)
Green: Historic structures and façades retained on site
Color-coding by the author. Image provided by The Jerde Partnership,
Inc.
In order to fit all the diverse programmatic elements needed, Jerde resisted an
orderly Cartesian arrangement and instead layered and overlapped various
components, and this layering became one of the driving forces behind the collage-like
aesthetic of the mall. By stacking department stores, burying the theater, and giving
92
smaller shops irregular floorplans, Horton Plaza’s massing becomes difficult to
understand.
In a contemporary critique of postmodern architecture, Kenneth Frampton
wrote in 1985 that:
At its most predetermined, Post-Modernism reduces architecture to a

condition in which the ‘package deal’ arranged by the
builder/developer determines the carcass and the essential substance of
the work, while the architect is reduced to contributing a suitably
seductive mask. 119
Jerde attempted to take the “package deal” provided by the CCDC and Hahn
(what had to be included in the mall) and arrange the necessary square footage in a
way that would drive the overall design logic. From the turned and stacked elements
of the mall, Jerde began designing a variety of façades to express different elements of
and connections through the mall. These façades are both portals and screening
elements, breaking down the massiveness of the single multiuse structure and giving
the interior armature of the mall the appearance of multiple buildings jammed together
along either side of an open-air pedestrian street. From the outside, despite various
façade treatments, the mall exhibited a massive rectilinearity and appeared closed off
to the city—the excitement exists entirely along the interior shopping concourse.
Hahn wanted a tenant mix that was diverse, vibrant, and reflected the mall’s
downtown site. This included businesses beyond what a typical suburban mall
contained, including a higher proportion of full-service restaurants than food stalls, the
550-seat repertory theater, 150-seat experimental theater, and a nightclub. These
119
Kenneth Frampton, Modern Architecture: A Critical History, Second Addition
(London: Thames & Hudson, 1985), 307.
93
ventures meant Horton Plaza Mall had a type of nightlife virtually non-existent in
suburban centers. 120
With department stores secured, Hahn’s team began working to sign the
additional tenants two years before the mall’s opening, as opposed to the typical 18 to
12 months before. Instead of relying on leasing agents (as was the standard industry
practice) Hahn did the work of finding tenants internally. National chains were not
discouraged, as long as they agreed to abandon their standard formulas for window
displays, signage, and layout and adapt to the unique aesthetic of the project. Hahn
preferred, and gave pride-of-place, to retailers selling merchandise or food unique to
San Diego. 121
Industry watchers were skeptical of the viability of the project, even with its
postmodern design and blend of local and national retailers. Four months before the
mall opened, an outside real estate consultant interviewed by the San Diego Evening
Tribune stated that “the industry looks at [Horton Plaza] as the biggest risk in the
country…There have been no major shopping centers on the scale of Horton Plaza in a
downtown as small and neglected as San Diego. It’s a real major reversal.” 122
120
Gordon, 3.
121
Gordon, 138.
122
Peter Rowe, “Focus: Horton Plaza: from remarkable vision to troubled reality,” The
San Diego Union-Tribune, January 20, 2017,
https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/business/growth-development/sd-me-horton-
94
Figure 46 Horton Plaza opening, Aug. 9, 1985. Although the shopping armature
was complete, construction on the mall’s multiplex movie theater (seen
atop the parking structure, left) continued through 1986. The hotel and
conference center as well as the apartment complex were completed
within the decade. Horton Plaza park is at bottom right. Image provided
by The Jerde Partnership, Inc.
Horton Plaza Mall opened on August 9, 1985 in a celebration worthy of the
festival-like atmosphere of its architecture. Following a gala fundraiser attended by
over 7,000 guests the evening before, on opening day a parade processed through San
Diego to the mall, the Navy Band played at its entrance, repeated showers of confetti
fell onto shoppers below, and, to officially open the mall, high-wire artist Philippe
Petit dramatically lowered a pair of scissors from his location eighty-feet above the
mall to awaiting officials ready to cut a floral garland. On the first day, 35,000 visitors,
95
far more than were expected, flocked to the mall and, in the words of one journalist,
“gawked at the quirky design by Jon Jerde.” 123 The mall was declared an instant hit
aesthetically.
Reflecting the memorable impact of Horton Plaza’s architecture, press
coverage focused largely on responses to the design rather than the mix of shops,
restaurants, or its downtown location. The mall was a public architectural spectacle.
Opinions from visitors in one magazines ranged from, “This place has character” to,
“It is intimate and yet big enough to be exciting,” and, “This is confusing as hell, but
it’s fun.” 124 One San Diego resident wrote the L.A. Times, “I thoroughly enjoy the
M.C. Escher-esque Horton Plaza (unless I have to get somewhere quickly).” 125
The Form of Horton Plaza
Jerde borrowed heavily from Moore’s toolbox of techniques: the use of
diagonal planning, Mannerist and Baroque geometries (including diagonals, ovals, and
spirals), screens and cut-outs that layer space, contrasts in scale and complexity, and
color, neon, and graphics to define space.
123
Roger Showley, “Horton Plaza marks 30th Birthday,” The San Diego Union-
Tribune, August 8, 2015,
http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/2015/aug/08/horton-downtown-
redevelopment/; Gordon, viii.
124
George Rand, “Architectural Comic Opera,” Architecture (January 1988): 71.
125
William Stout, “Retracing the Original Footsteps to CityWalk” Letter, Los Angeles
Times, May 1, 2000, http://articles.latimes.com/2000/may/01/entertainment/ca-25239.
96
Figure 47 Sketch attributed to Jon Jerde outlining the armature of Horton
Plaza, ca. 1981-1982. Image provided by The Jerde Partnership, Inc.
97
Figure 48 Isometric drawing, Horton Plaza, ca. 1981-1985. Notice the diagonal
armature with two principal arcs. Horton Plaza park at lower right. Image
provided by The Jerde Partnership, Inc.
Figure 49 Section cut, looking north west, through Horton Plaza armature, ca.
1981-1985. Not to scale of isometric drawing. Image provided by The
Jerde Partnership, Inc.
98
Horton Plaza’s shopping concourse, what Jerde called the armature, cuts
diagonally through the mega-structure and provides access across the site and into the
mall’s businesses. The 1960s, when postmodernism began its rise, had been defined
by critic Ray Smith and others as “the decade of the diagonal,” and it was a planning
conceit Moore and many others used extensively. 126 Smith wrote in 1977 that
“Symbolically, the diagonal was adopted as the line that cut across established
traditions, breaking out of the box and exploding ‘the architecture of squares.’” 127
Moore used the diagonal to plan houses as early as the Bonham House of 1962 until
his death, and his Faculty Club in Santa Barbara, Kresge College, and Williams
College Museum of Art (1977-1986) were all arranged along diagonals. Most
prominently, Moore used a diagonal organizing spine at the Beverly Hills Civic Center
(1984-1990). Here, the diagonal brings users across a very large site, breaks down the
mass of a large government complex, and relates the new construction to the adjacent
historic Spanish Revival city hall. The diagonal both destabilizes and implies motion
through space.
126
C. Ray Smith, Supermannerism: New Attitudes in Post-Modern Architecture (New
York: Plume, 1977), 100.
127
Smith, 100.
99
Figure 50 Site plan, Beverly Hills Civic Center, 1982-1990. Charles W. Moore
and Urban Innovations Group in association with Albert C. Martin and
Associates, Beverly Hills, California. © Charles Moore Foundation.
Within the diagonal armature at Horton Plaza, a high density of unique
architectural façades and circulation elements are squeezed into the long, narrow, five-
story void. The armature is of irregular width and is dominated by two shallow
opposing arcs. Seen from above, the mall reads as an overstuffed box: everything
squeezed into and pushing out of the central void while being neatly contained within
the orthogonal six block site. The building mass functions as solid background, while
the dynamic diagonal links together discrete storefronts providing access into, and out
of, the interior.
100
Figure 51 Aerial view of Horton Plaza, ca. 2010. G-Street is the southern (left)
boundary of the mall. Wikimedia user Phil Konstantin, CC-by-3.0.
The diagonal armature connects Horton Plaza park at the northeast corner of
the mall to the intersection of G Street and First Avenue on the southwest corner of the
site, an axis that logically reaches from the center city (Horton Plaza park) to the San
Diego Bay, and a formal gesture first proposed for the site in the redevelopment plans
produced by ROMA in 1973 (at the height of diagonal planning). But while ROMA
proposed a diagonal open vista, Jerde’s armature was narrower and filled with
architectural elements. Instead of visually linking points across the city, the diagonal
armature serves as the destination within the city itself.
101
The architecture along the armature is a riot of movement and decoration, and
much like Moore’s work, gains meaning and richness from mining and abstracting
historic building forms. Spanish, Moorish, and Renaissance-inspired façades mingled
with parapets, balconies, and flags, all of it interconnected with towers, stairways, and
bridges. Jerde subdivided the armature into six areas, what he called “events” or
“villages,” around which were grouped cohesive architectural details and similar
tenants. 128 Each of the six sections is marked by an architectural element: each
department store features a tower, the food court is announced by a black-and-white
triangular palazzo, and the top floor restaurants and nightclub circle a temple-like,
steel-frame pavilion.
The pavilions intersect and collide with each other, layering space and
participating in what Moore called the “Doctrine of Immaculate Collision,” where two
things (familiar and unfamiliar) “can collide—smash into each other—and that what
remains is the shape of a wonderful new architecture.” 129 The immaculateness comes
from the fact that the colliding pieces aren’t destroyed by the act (“like railroad cars
are when they engage in the same action”) but both remain whole and the collision
forms new shapes full of surprises and powerful occurrences. 130 Rooted along the
diagonal armature, Horton Plaza’s intersecting stairs and arcades, pavilions that
128
Crawford, You are Here, 50; Ann Bergren, “Jon Jerde and the Architecture of
Pleasure,” Assemblage 37 (1998): 14. These “villages” were known as Chelsea Court,
the Esplanade, Columbus Tower, Galleria, and the Colonnade at the time of the mall’s
opening.
129
Moore, “Architecture and Fairy Tales,” 242.
130 Moore, “Architecture and Fairy Tales,” 242.
102
straddle pathways, and other collaged elements participate in their own logic of
“immaculate collision.”
The towers and pavilions Jerde distributed across the armature provide visual
interest within the spatial complexity of Horton Plaza and reference specific forms
from architectural history and European cityscapes. There is a pavilion modeled after a
palazzo, a watchtower, a cathedral, and a tempietto; each protruding into the diagonal
void. Like other postmodern architects of the era, Jerde derives many of his details by
abstracting important works of historic architecture: Florence's San Miniato al Monte
Cathedral, Sienna’s Piazza del Campo and its cathedral, and Bramante’s Tempietto in
Rome all make cameo appearances in the mall. These references reinforced Jerde’s
idea of the mall as an urban experience, a new pedestrian city street crossing the center
of San Diego.
103
Figure 52 Sienna Cathedral, 1196-1358. Giovanni di Agostino, Giovanni Pisano,
Camino di Crescentino, Sienna, Italy. Wikimedia user Globus.tut.by.
(CC-BY-SA-4.0).
Figure 53 San Pietro in Montorio, 1481. Donato Bramante, Rome, Italy.

Wikimedia user Dogears (CC BY 2.0).
Figure 54 Broadway Fountain at Horton Plaza park, 1911. Irving Gill, San
Diego, California. Wikimedia user bcgrote (CC-BY-SA-2.0).
104
Figure 55 Horton Plaza “Palazzo” pavilion, 1985. Photograph by Steve Aldana,
2019. Esoteric Survey.
Figure 56 Horton Plaza tempietto with steel frame pavilion behind, 1985.
Photograph by Colleen Chartier, ca. 1985-1987. Rights provided by
ArtStor, image and original data provided by Art on File; artonfile.com.
In the development of the project, Hahn and the CCDC held public hearings
concerning the project design where Jerde presented the mall model juxtaposed with
slide photographs of its neighboring context, the Gaslamp Quarter, as well as images
of Venice and Italian hill towns. Jerde’s intent was to draw positive parallels between
San Diego’s existing colorful Victorian commercial district, the vibrant Mediterranean
palette of Venice, and his own bright, energetic proposal for the mall. 131
Jerde compared his design for the armature of Horton Plaza to images of the
meandering market streets and piazzas of Italian hill towns, praising San Gimignano
and Volterra as successful examples of dynamic public spaces formed by diverse
groups of buildings following local vernaculars without an identifiable architect. 132
These same towns were featured in MoMA’s Architecture without Architects
exhibition, served as inspiration for Moore’s Kresge College, and were discussed
extensively in the architectural community in the 1960s and 1970s. Jerde had visited
Tuscany in 1964 on a travel fellowship in his final year at the University of Southern
California. Continuing the tradition of adapting the lessons of Italian hill towns for
131
Gordon, 121-122.
132
Ed Leibowitz, “The Solitary Existence of L.A.’s Mall Mastermind,” Los Angeles
Magazine, February 1, 2002, https://www.lamag.com/longform/crowd-pleaser/.
105
American projects, Jerde extolled European cities while he juxtaposed slide images of
the Horton Plaza model and scenes of Italy. 133
Figure 57 San Gimignano, Italy. Medieval Italian hill towns provided inspiration
and precedent for Jon Jerde’s ideals of urban space. Courtesy of the
Author, 2009.
Figure 58 San Gimignano, Italy. Courtesy of the Author, 2009.
Through these slide comparisons, the large Horton Plaza model, and
Bradbury’s essay, what Jerde proposed creating for San Diego was an allegory of
urban experience. In its complexity of layout and style of decoration, Horton Plaza
would be a radical departure from any commercial building at this scale. As
experienced, Horton Plaza offers delight in illegibility rooted in Jerde’s specific
133
Gordon, 121-122.
106
interpretation of urban character that favors spatial variety, architectural eclecticism,
and an atmosphere of discovery.
While Jerde claimed his inspiration came from memories of specific urban
places, what he called “the intelligent geography of European cities,” his
interpretations of history also borrow heavily from the work of his contemporaries in
architecture and are expressed in the postmodern sensibility of the time. Various
elements in the mall are derivative of work by the major form-makers of postmodern
architecture, including Aldo Rossi, Michael Graves, Terry Farrell, Robert Venturi,
Denise Scott Brown, and of course, Moore. Interpreting and adapting contemporary
postmodern architectural forms, Jerde attempts to bring his mall into conversation
with the architectural zeitgeist.
The Aesthetics of Horton Plaza
At the same time Jerde was completing Horton Plaza, Moore designed the
Wonderwall, the 2,400-foot-long, 10-foot-wide, three-story-high centerpiece of New
Orleans’s 1984 World’s Fair. Moore devised the wall as a temporary fantasy, neither
building nor wall but a collage of simple materials—papier-mâché, fabric, and
stucco—in the form of animals, urns, columns, domes, and turrets, all arranged along
construction scaffolding. 134 Multiple designers worked on elements of the wall under
Moore’s direction, and the effect was one of an extended, static Mardi Gras parade. (In
fact, Mardi Gras workshops produced the animals and sculpture groups). Meant to
134Paul Goldberger, “There’s Fun in the Fair’s Architecture, but Not Quite Enough,”
The New York Times, May 13, 1984, https://www.nytimes.com/1984/05/13/us/there-s-
fun-in-the-fair-s-architecutre-but-not-quite-enough.html.
107
enliven the unadorned, functional architecture of the fair’s main building (a new
convention center) and hide overhead wires, it was temporary architecture bringing
fantasy to a drab site. The Wonderwall exemplified Moore’s dedication to what he
called “fairy tale architecture,” appropriate for the region and the temporary, festive
purpose. This idea—simple, inexpensive materials artfully used for dramatic effect—
can be seen in both Horton Plaza, and in an important contemporary project by Jerde:
the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics.
Figure 59 Wonderwall, 1984, dismantled. Charles W. Moore and William

Turnbull with August Perez Associates, Kent Bloomer, Leonard Salvato,
and Arthur Andersson and Urban Innovations Group, Louisiana World
Exposition, New Orleans, Louisiana. Kent & Tamiko Stumpe.
108
Jon Jerde had successfully worked with graphic identity firm of
Sussman/Prejza to produce the graphics and identity of the 1984 Los Angeles Olympic
Games, and he would return to Deborah Sussman (1931-2014) to produce the color
scheme and graphic identity of the mall. Sussman, who had trained in the influential
Eames Office, worked with Jerde to create an adaptable system that linked together
Olympic sites spread across the 503-square mile L.A. metropolitan area. 135 Using
what they called “urban confetti,” the partnership produced a series of exuberant set-
dressings and colorful follies made of cardboard, fabric, and paper meant to transform
L.A. from a non-place into a festive and celebratory destination. The colors chosen
were shockingly bright, with Sussman exploiting the brevity of the games by using
hues that would quickly fade in any permanent installation. Sussman and Jerde
mapped out a set of color combinations and forms, accompanied by guidelines for
their use, that other designers deployed as a “kit of parts” at Olympic sites. The
graphic system was applied to paper columns, plastic banners, fabric bunting, and
painted chain link. The press christened it “graphic architecture.” 136
135 Michael Webb, “Sussman/Prejza: The Poetry of Place,” Graphis 339 (May/June
2002): 102-117. Deborah Sussman established her eponymous studio in 1968, and
formed a partnership with her husband, architect Paul Prejza in 1980. Others at the
Sussman/Prejza office at the time of Horton Plaza Mall’s construction included
apprentices of Charles Moore and Frank Gehry, as well as other former Eames Office
employees.
136
Joseph Giovannini, “LA’s Graphic Games,” Design Quarterly, 127, Special Issue,
LA84: Games of the XXIII Olympiad (1985): 7-35.
109
Figure 60 Temporary installation of flags and tents for the Los Angeles 1984
Summer Olympics, 1982-1984. Jon Jerde and Sussman/Prejza.
Sussman/Prejza & Co.
Figure 61 Temporary installation of painted cardboard tubes and banners for

the Los Angeles 1984 Summer Olympics, 1982-1984. Jon Jerde and
Sussman/Prejza. Sussman/Prejza & Co.
Figure 62 Temporary installation of scaffolding, fabric, and pictograph

structure for the Los Angeles 1984 Summer Olympics, 1982-1984.
Jon Jerde and Sussman/Prejza. Sussman/Prejza & Co.
110
Using such impermanent and humble materials as cardboard and scaffolding to
transform the city, Jerde and Sussman were tapping into a global strategy of colored-
paper urbanism, from wedding parties in India or saint’s days in Mexico. 137 The
design succeeded in visually connecting the games for television audiences, while at
the same time providing a festive atmosphere for those in attendance. At the end of the
games in August 1984, Time magazine reported that, "If there was a special gold
medal for creative ingenuity, the U.S. Olympic design team should win it." 138
In San Diego, Deborah Sussman intended Horton Plaza to be a permanent
iteration of the successful Olympic strategy; to use color, fabric, signage, and other
moveable elements (carts and kiosks) to create a sense of continuous festival. Sussman
devised a palette of forty-nine vivid colors, favoring various shades of ochre, mauve,
and peach, that covered every surface of the mall. Drawing inspiration from the colors
of Italian cities, the architecture of Latin America, and the landscape of San Diego,
Sussman applied multiple shades and tones of color onto Jerde’s architectural
elements: a sky-blue bridge with navy window frames and rust colonnettes, a red
arcade with pink lunettes, a peach tower with ochre spandrels and rust trim. Where
walls are interrupted by benches or railings, a new textural element, color, or pattern
would be introduced. The partnership of Jerde and Sussman parallels that of Charles
Moore and graphic designers Barbara Stauffacher Solomon and Tina Beebe, who
137
Wouter Vanstiphout, Review of You Are Here by Francis Anderton, Harvard
Design Magazine 12 (Fall 2000),
http://www.harvarddesignmagazine.org/issues/12/you-are-here-by-frances-anderton.
138Quoted in Allison Engel, “In memorium: Jon Jerde, 75,” USCNews, February 10,
2015, https://news.usc.edu/75271/in-memoriam-jon-jerde-75/.
111
created the color schemes and supergraphics for many of his projects. In fact, Beebe’s
choice of “terra cotta, curry, and chamois-ocher” (her designations) at the Piazza
d’Italia mirror Sussman’s use of a Mediterranean palette of “dusty coral, light yellow
ochre, and greyed turquoise blue” at Horton Plaza. 139
Figure 63 Color palette by Sussman. Photograph by David Marshall, 1987.
Figure 64 Color palette by Sussman. The exterior of the palazzo form, in black
and white tile, is Jerde’s design; the interior is yellow. Behind, the
exterior of the multiplex is Sussman’s design of patterned stucco in
yellow and ochre. Photograph by David Marshall, 1987.
139 “Taking it to Heart,” Interiors 145 (December 1985): 152.
112
Sussman’s role expanded to include fabric banners, ribbons, and decorative
signage to be hung throughout the mall, further layering color and shapes into the
already complex architecture of screens, bridges, and surface decoration. Taking
advantage of sea breezes across the site, these billowing flags animated and softened
the hard edges of the vertical void of the mall. These integral nylon banners were
referred to by Jerde as “the jewelry of the ensemble,” using the same language Moore
used for defining his own appliques of textiles, neon, and decorative artifacts. 140 If, in
another of Jerde’s phrases, the architecture was “glued on,” then the layering of
graphics and textiles enhanced the architectural collage.
140 “Taking it to Heart,” 153.
113
Figure 65 Banners by Sussman. Photograph by David Marshall, 1987.
Figure 66 Banners by Sussman. Nylon banners were complimented by ribbons of

black and white squares. Photograph by David Marshall, 1987.
Materials used to construct Horton Plaza were a mix of urban street finishes
paired with more expensive or decorative materials. Just as the presentation model had
been made of cardboard and paint, Horton Plaza uses visual cheats and stage-set
devices in its construction. Painted stucco, corrugated metal, and exposed concrete are
used throughout the mall as decorative and economical finishes. As they are for
Moore, the inexpensive treatments are part of the design idea and contribute to the
sense of impermanence and playfulness. The thinness of walls and bridges add to the
sense that the structure was assembled haphazardly, like a play structure, as opposed
to a permanent edifice.
114
Figure 67 Material details. Stucco walls, Styrofoam milled moldings, and cast
foam or cast stone classical female keystones. Getty Images.
Figure 68 Material details. Sonotube-formed concrete columns and expressed steel

framework. Pathways throughout Horton Plaza are left as dark concrete,
occasionally with decorative tiles added. Photograph by Colleen
Chartier, ca. 1985-1987. Rights provided by ArtStor, image and original
data provided by Art on File; artonfile.com.
Figure 69 Material details. Expressed rivets on oversized circular gusset plates,

portions of the frame are infilled with wire mesh. Photograph by David
Marshall, 1987.
115
Store tenants within the mall were allowed substantial freedom in their
designs, and storefronts ranged from Parisian to Space Age, with a strong showing of
postmodern design trends. As they had done for the Olympics, Sussman and Jerde
developed a list of design guidelines for architects and designers outfitting Horton
Plaza, but these rules were intended to maintain quality and aesthetic exuberance
instead of conformity. The stores in Horton Plaza were, according to Paul Goldberger,
architecture critic for The New York Times, “much more expressive and energetic than
their counterparts in other malls.” 141 Indeed, some of the individual storefronts were
featured in architecture and design periodicals on their own; Grondona Architects’
three shop designs (Claudia’s Bakery, Boardwalk Fries, and Wonder Sushi Plus) were
given a lavishly illustrated six-page spread in Progressive Architecture. 142 In their
own right these storefronts were achievements of commercial postmodernism; their
placement within the context of Horton Plaza only heightened their potency.
141
Paul Goldberger, “In Downtown San Diego, A Freewheeling Fantasy,” The New
York Times, March 19, 1986, https://www.nytimes.com/1986/03/19/us/in-downtown-
san-diego-a-freewheeling-fantasy.html.
142
David Morton, “Attack of the Killer Fries,” Progressive Architecture (September
1986): 116-120.
116
Figure 70 Claudia’s Sweet Bun Emporium, Horton Plaza, ca. 1985. Grondona
Architects, San Diego, California. The flexible metal tubing at the center
of the overscale cutter is connected to a mechanical vent above the
cinnamon buns, pumping the fresh baked scent into the experiential
architecture of Horton Plaza. Photograph by David Marshall, 1987.
117
Prefabricated cast concrete commercial ornaments in the form of lion heads,
pinecones, and foliated corbels are placed alongside a variety of cast balustrades and
metal railings. These ornaments do not read as integral architectural elements, but as if
they’ve been stuck onto the building with superglue. Victorian Revival light fixtures
line the walkways, while pressed tin ceilings mark many of the interior walkways.
Though there were historic buildings and building façades incorporated into the
project, there is little concern for historic or structural honesty; Jerde had no intention
of presenting the mall with any material pretensions or preservation ethos but as a
visually exciting experience. In contrast to Moore’s use of historic forms, Jerde
displays little sense of intentionality behind the individual selection of ornament—
there is no greater architectural game or esoteric reference, only the broadly accessible
associative value of the decorative object or fixture placed within the environment.
118
Figure 71 Victorian-inspired light fixtures. Courtesy of the Author, 2015.
Figure 72 Tin-pressed ceilings within the red arcade. Courtesy of the Author,
2015.
Figure 73 Cast foam or concrete lion head. Courtesy of the Author, 2015.
Figure 74 Cast foam or concrete corbels with acanthus leaf ornament. These
historic details allude to an idealized American main street, particularly
as imagined by Walt Disney at Disneyland. Courtesy of the Author, 2015.
119
Instead of specific precedent sources, the mall’s use of Victorian design
elements in the lighting, ceilings, and ornament allude to specific ideas of American
urbanism, particularly the idealized Main Street as constructed by Walt Disney (1901-
1966) at Disneyland. Disneyland opened in 1955 and was identified by Moore a
decade later as one of the few places for traditional urban experiences in California,
had been one of the first developments to combine vernacular architecture with
modern commercial activity. Disney focused on designing the experience and feeling
of place over any academic architectural principles. 143 The Victorian features at
Horton Plaza, then, connect the postmodern mall to an idealized American Main Street
by way of Disneyland more succinctly than any historical model.
143 ChuihuaJudy Chung, “Disney Space,” in Harvard Design School Guide to

Shopping, ed. Chuihua Judy Chung, Jeffrey Inaba, Rem Koolhaas, Sze Tsung Leong,
(Koln: Taschen, 2001), 280.
120
Figure 75 Main Street USA, Disneyland, 1955. Walt Disney and Disney
Imagineers, Anaheim, California. Disneyland combined American
nostalgia for small town main streets with contemporary entertainment
and retail. Photographed ca. 1960. Flickr user Tom Simpson, CC BY-NC-
ND 2.0.
121
The most prominent coup in making the mall San Diego-specific was the
acquisition of the ornate Jessop’s Clock, a city landmark and Edwardian-era
technological marvel that had stood since 1907 at the heart of San Diego’s commercial
district. The 21-dial-face pendulum clock was relocated from the intersection of
Broadway and Fifth Avenue two blocks south west into the heart of Horton Plaza. 144
There, with its dramatically large dials and golden eagle finial centered within Jerde’s
colorful street fantasy, the clock signaled a geographic shift in the commercial district
of San Diego to the mall, and furthered the argument that Jerde’s armature was, in
fact, a street. It also paralleled Moore’s use of found objects or historic artifacts to
complete the place-making architectural scheme.
144
Joseph E. Jessop, “The Jessop Street Clock: A San Diego landmark,” Journal of
San Diego History (Winter 1987),
https://www.sandiegohistory.org/journal/87winter/clock.htm.
122
Figure 76 Jessop’s Clock outside J. Jessop & Sons Jewelers, ca. 1940. 1041 Fifth
Avenue, San Diego, California. San Diego History Center, Photo ID
#8973.
Figure 77 Jessop’s Clock at Horton Plaza. Image provided by The Jerde

Partnership, Inc.
This borrowing of San Diego’s actual history and placing it within Horton
Plaza’s fantasy street extended from Jessop’s Clock to the scale of entire buildings.
Hahn was permitted to demolish two historic buildings on the mall site, the Knights of
Pythias and Bradley buildings, after they were deemed seismically unsafe, with the
promise to reincorporate elements into the mall. Jerde did this by making casts of the
principle stone façades of the 1911 Bradley building and recreating the structure on (or
123
very close to) its original site at the corner of Broadway and Third Avenue, along the
south side of Horton Plaza park. The reconstructed cast concrete and stucco façade sat
adjacent to the much larger Robinson’s department store at the northern edge of the
mall, which ran across the entire frontage of the park. Façadism, a widely performed
practice of preservation since the early 1970s, results in a skin-deep form of
conservation that often fails to integrate the historic façade into the newer building. In
this case, the spolia façade’s delicate scale and muted coloring clashed with the
exuberant, abstracted scale of the adjacent department store (designed in consultation
with Jerde by Robinson’s in-house architects). 145 This juxtaposition of contemporary
design and materials with historical fabric is a typical postmodern approach to
preservation.
145 Gordon, 136. While Jerde was initially not commissioned to design the department
stores (who, as an industry practice, used their own architects when building new
stores), he was eventually asked to design the façades of the Broadway department
store and the entrances to each store from the central armature. The street-facing
façades and interiors of Nordstrom, Robinsons, and Mervyn’s were designed by their
in-house architects in consultation with Jerde.
124
Figure 78 View of Horton Plaza (park) looking south over future site of Horton
Plaza (mall), after 1920. The façades of the Bradley building (facing the
park at far right), and the Knights of Pythias building (five-story building
at back right), would be reincorporated into the mall. Third Street, right,
was closed for the mall. San Diego History Center, Photo ID #8973.
Figure 79 View along Third Street sidewalk of Horton Plaza. Reconstructed

façade of Bradley building (left) and reimagined Knights of Pythias
building (right), entrance to mall center and Macy’s at far right.
Photographed ca. 2014. Flickr user Andy E. Nystrom CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.
125
Ornamental roundels and other decorative elements were removed prior to the
demolition of the palazzo-type Knights of Pythias building one block south of the park
at Third Avenue and E Street, and Jerde recreated a variation of that structure at the
entrance of the mall. Again placed on the site of the original, the reinterpreted Knights
of Pythias building was rendered in stucco, at a larger scale, and its window frames,
moldings, and cornice were highly stylized. Reattaching historic elements from the
building (either as casts or originals) retained a memory of the original. Viewed
together with the reconstructed Bradley building down Third Avenue, the street
maintains a highly stylized semblance of its former vista. Jerde did not engage in any
typical methods of preservation, but instead treated the historic structures as
scenographic props in service to his desired visual effect. 146
146
Federica Goffi, Time Matter(s): Invention and Re-Imagination in Built
Conservation: The Unfinished Drawing and Building of St. Peters, the Vatican (New
York: Routledge, 2016), 11.
126
Figure 80 Detail of the reimagined Knights of Pythias building intersecting red
arcade. Photograph by David Marshall, 1987.
Shopping Horton Plaza
The cumulative effect of Jerde’s efforts was an exciting, confusing, and
unexpected place, and movement through the mall discovering its features, quirks, and
shops, is its greatest architectural pleasure. Accepting Moore’s idea that architecture
should form memorable places for activity, not only form itself, Horton Plaza
succeeds in creating a powerful (and specific) sense of place.
Visitors arriving to the new mall on foot, by bus, or from the newly opened
streetcar line connecting Horton Plaza to the Mexican border would begin at the
historic Horton Plaza park, and walk down the reconstructed Third Avenue into the
mall. Here is perhaps the best view of the mall from the city, where Jerde’s earlier
127
claim that “when we’re all done, you won’t know that this didn’t exist before” can
plausibly be appreciated. 147 Beyond the Bradley building and jutting out of the side of
the reimagined Knights of Pythias is a four-story open arcade, at the base of which
rises a multi-colored obelisk by artist Joan Brow. The obelisk acts as both sign and
symbol, signaling the entrance to the mall and the transition from the actual streets of
San Diego and into the fantasy urbanity of Horton Plaza. Decorated with ceramic tiles
and depicting (from bottom to top) fish, animals, birds, and a smiling sun, the colorful
obelisk is a precursor to the colors and fantasy found inside. It is also one of a series of
objects placed within the mall that serve as markers, or monuments, leading from
Irving Gill’s 1911 fountain in Horton Plaza park to Jessop’s Clock.
147
Showley, “Architects Ready.”
128
Figure 81 Obelisk by Joan Brow marking the mall entrance, 1985. Robinson’s
department store is behind, the glass canopy connects the mall to the
reconstructed Bradley building (out of frame, left). At right is the
entrance to the mall, through the red arcade. Photograph by Colleen
Chartier, ca. 1985-1987. Rights provided by ArtStor, image and original
data provided by Art on File; artonfile.com.
Figure 82 Entrance court. The obelisk rises from below street level, past the stairs
descending to the lobby of the lower level Lyceum theater. Jerde forces
visitors to the mall to move around the void, the first of many instances
where the architecture orchestrates a non-linear path through the mall.
Photograph by Dell Upton, ca. 2015. Rights provided by ArtStor.
Discovering these markers as one progresses through the mall helps to order
and establish a sense of place, and ties into Moore’s insistence that “landmarks have
129
for centuries ordered our sense of position.” 148 Moore praised the obelisks set up by
Pope Sixtus V in Rome in the 1580s, as they “let the pilgrim understand where he was
and where he was going.” Moore argued that “A processional way, passing from
landmark to landmark along an axis…can coalesce space” and ultimately “intensifies
the importance of being there.” Jerde marks his mall entrance with an obelisk, and
then sites subsequent monuments across the site in such a way as to create nodes of
importance. Acting at the scale of the mall (as opposed to the whole city of Rome),
Jerde compresses the anchors into the armature, heightening the intensity of
experience.
Moving past the obelisk, there are no gates or barriers between the city
sidewalk and the mall. The continuity of concrete ground allows a borderless
transition from public sidewalk into private mall, again highlighting Jerde’s aim of
making the mall an extension of the street life of San Diego. The diagonal armature of
the mall is entered through a series of steps (modeled, according to Jerde, after the
Spanish steps in Rome), and looking in from the sidewalk, an array of multi-colored
façades seen between columns and through cut outs in screen walls catches the eye
and draw the shopper inside.
Crossing over the entrance steps at the angle of the diagonal armature is a four-
level red arcade with arched openings under which visitors pass. The northern end of
the armature is anchored by this straight arcade that provides a linear route through
one half of the mall from which other pathways diverge. The open gallery structure
148Charles Moore, “The General and the Specific” in Charles Moore, Donlyn Lyndon,
Patrick Quinn, and Sim Van der Ryn, “Toward Making Places,” Landscape (Autumn
1962), reprinted in Keim, 91.
130
reads like an element from a di Chirico painting, revealing the silhouettes of people
moving about high above. While bits and pieces of other stores and façades are visible
through the arched openings, the presence of the red arcade blocks any significant
view into, and significantly, out of, the main armature.
Figure 83 Red arcade, looking north (out) from the mall. Running across half of
the armature and linking the two northern department stores (Robinson’s
and Broadway [Macy’s after 1996]), the arcade frames views in and out
of the armature. Photograph by Colleen Chartier, ca. 1985-1987. Rights
provided by ArtStor, image and original data provided by Art on File;
artonfile.com.
131
Figure 84 Entrance to the armature from Third Street. This entrance was what
Jerde called his “Spanish Steps.” Sign by Sussman/Prejza announces “Let
our Mimes, Jugglers, and Musicians entertain you!” Photograph by
Colleen Chartier, ca. 1985-1987. Rights provided by ArtStor, image and
original data provided by Art on File; artonfile.com.
132
Figure 85 The top of the steps, through the red arcade. Note the food cart
designed by Sussman/Prejza. Photograph by Colleen Chartier, ca. 1985-
1987. Rights provided by ArtStor, image and original data provided by
Art on File; artonfile.com.
133
A visitor to Horton Plaza in its early years would have found street
entertainers, including balloon artists, costumed characters, jugglers, mimes, and a
plethora of musicians, stationed throughout the mall. Vendor carts and kiosks designed
by Sussman/Prezja in varying shapes and sizes were spread across the mall, further
enlivening the space. These carts—selling food, souvenirs, and small gifts—proved to
be the most lucrative retail square footage in the mall, a reflection of its vibrant
pedestrian traffic. Also on offer: architectural tours of Horton Plaza. 149 In both
Moore’s conception of community and Jerde’s, the fact that this “street life” was
programmed by the mall management did not discount from its pleasure or diminish
its benefit to building up a memorable sense of place and architectural distinction.
149 Dennis Morgino, “Horton Plaza Grand Opening,” News Center 39/NBC 7 San
Diego video, August 9, 1985, 2:03, posted July 1, 2019,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thG4scWOr1E.
134
Figure 86 Signage, carts, and banners by Sussman/Prejza. Hippopotamus
topiaries behind. Photograph by Colleen Chartier, ca. 1985-1987. Rights
provided by ArtStor, image and original data provided by Art on File;
artonfile.com.
135
Once inside the mall, Jerde replaced the legible, linear circulation of the typical
suburban shopping center with an episodic, even confusing pathway that serves as
both circulation, gathering, and entertainment space. This suggests that the
transparency of the linear path of the archetypal mall (transparent in that the
destination and overall layout makes clear how to get to destination stores and is seen
right from the start) is replaced by a journey that is the destination.
The dissolution of clarity within the diagonal armature is part of the overall
aesthetic Jerde developed for the mall: the “glued on” façades fronted the necessary
gross square footage of retail space, and as the blocks of parking, department stores,
and shops jostled for frontage along the armature, each element was given an
individual architectural identity.
136
Figure 87 Collage of six views within the armature. There are extensive and
varied circulation options throughout the armature. Courtesy of the
Author, 2015.
137
Instead of having paired sets of escalators at either end of the armature, as a
typical mall might, Jerde multiplies the modes and means of horizontal and vertical
circulation in “the service of movement without an end.” 150 The visitor is faced with
choices at numerous points, rather than just go forward or reverse in a linear plan.
Choices are presented in the form of thin, short bridges or different colored escalators
that leave the impression they may have been tacked onto the architectural scheme and
could be removed at any moment. The thinness of the circulation elements read like
pieces of a children’s play set, where parts can be endlessly rearranged.
There is a certain logic to where circulation occurs in the plan, but as a visitor
it is difficult to decipher. Even when consulting the mall directory, it is hard to locate
exactly where you are or how you might navigate to your favorite store. Instead, the
architecture encourages meandering and making your own path, moving between
bright open areas along the armature, across bridges and stairways, and through dark
corridors adjacent retail shops and department stores.
150
Bergen, 17.
138
Figure 88 View, looking south, across northern end of armature. Photograph by
Steve Aldana, 2019. Esoteric Survey.
139
Figure 89 View, looking south, through central pavilion across southern end of
armature. Repetition of curves in plan and elevation continuously move
the eye, and body, forward. Image provided by The Jerde Partnership,
Inc.
140
Moving through the mall, the visitor never confronts a flat wall directly and
constantly moves from one oblique vista to the next. Every time it appears an apex is
about to be reached, a new picturesque scene unfolds. Historian Ann Bergen describes
a walk through the mall as “continually promising a new ‘somewhere’, a new
‘something’ ahead, if only we keep moving along. This sense of planar endlessness is
just the beginning of the project’s visual paradox.” 151
As you move through the complex, it becomes utterly confounding as to how
far above or below street level you may be. As you are almost constantly moving
upward, the slope of the site works against you; the street level drops a story from the
northeast to the southwest corners. The entire mall acts as a long, meandering spiral.
151
Bergen, 17.
141
Figure 90 Walls as screening elements layer views and frame space. Photograph
by Steve Aldana, 2019. Esoteric Survey.
Figure 91 Intersection of circulation and framed views. Photograph by Steve

Aldana, 2019. Esoteric Survey.
In addition to changing elevations, crisscrossing paths create a network of sight
lines between places that are not physically in succession. Through oblique sight lines,
the perceived starting point of any one perspective may appear to continuously move;
the parallax effect (where an object appears to change as one changes position) can be
found looking forward, as well as up or down, as one moves through the mall. Such
shifting views make visiting Horton Plaza an especially rich place to people watch.
Quests are central to fairy tales—the search for something lost in order to
return it—and this yearning, too, drives the visitor to Horton Plaza. A yearning to find
142
the perfect item within one of the mall’s shops, or a yearning to sort out the mall’s
layout. While Moore admired Hadrian’s Villa for its elaborate, ambiguous spaces and
the Forum in Rome for its palimpsest of history atop history, at Horton Plaza Jerde
collages various elements together in such a way as to build excitement as you move
through the mall. 152 Not knowing what each part’s purpose is, or where each path
leads, builds in mystery to the complex and drives the feeling of fairy tale architecture.
As shoppers move through the armature, they cross through, beneath, or are
able to enter into the various pavilions Jerde developed from historic sources. These
non-revenue generating forms provide semi-enclosed spaces for single individuals or
small groups within the larger mall environment. Moore argued that these types of
spaces “maintain an air of importance,” where one might sense that the entire world
turns around that very spot. 153 Moore felt architecture, in particular fairy tale
architecture like that of Horton Plaza, should include such shrines or aediculae to
establish a variety of feelings and associations within an environment. 154
With the triangular black-and-white striped Palazzo, where Jerde placed tables
for the food stalls ringing the upper level of the mall, the large façade demands
attention while simultaneously reading as a set piece. Faced with small black, white,
and red tiles evoking Sienna’s cathedral on the outside, and smooth yellow stucco
152
153
154
143
inside, it declares its own importance while marking the center of the mall. 155 Like
Moore’s laundry room façade at Kresge College, this element does not read as a three-
dimensional building but as a two-dimensional face forming the character of the space
in front of it and marking the space within.
When visitors arrive at the highest, fifth, level of the mall, they are presented
with a vista back over the opening of the armature with its criss-crossing bridges and
pavilions. San Diego’s tall buildings circling the mall are transformed from skyline
into another layer of Jerde’s own façades. What you cannot see is the city street life of
San Diego outside the mall, with its cars and pedestrians, or even the city’s iconic bay,
just four blocks away. Instead, the sequence of framed and revealed spaces culminates
in an entirely internal and self-referential vista back across the mall’s armature.
Without views from within the mall towards the city streets, visitors arriving by car
experience the mall as completely apart from the urban fabric of San Diego and have
no visual connection with the city as anything other than the towers closest to the mall.
155The patterned tiling was designed by Jerde and his office, not by Sussman/Prezja.
Paul Prezja in discussion with the author, June 2016.
144
Figure 92 View from the fifth level of Horton Plaza north across the armature,
with San Diego’s central business district rising behind. Image
provided by The Jerde Partnership, Inc.
145
Charles Moore, Disneyland, and Horton Plaza
The architecture of Horton Plaza created a wonderland of retail in downtown
San Diego, and the experience of moving through the mall was unlike any other
shopping center in the country. The sense of discovery and a cinematic movement
through space lends the mall its sense of specialness.
Moore’s search for California’s public places in “You Have to Pay for the
Public Life” led him to find it at Disneyland. There, Moore identified a place (perhaps
the only place) where Californians could participate in traditional, pedestrian-oriented
urban experiences. He praised Disneyland for “replacing and extending many of those
elements of the public realm which have vanished in the featureless, private floating
world of Southern California.” Horton Plaza, too, worked to create its own, distinct
public realm replete with urban pleasures, and its similarities to Disneyland did not go
unnoticed by critics and visitors. Goldberger kicked off his review of Horton Plaza in
The New York Times writing, “There is a bit of Disneyland inside every shopping
mall, struggling to get out. In Horton Plaza, the struggle is over: Disneyland has burst
through with a vengeance.” 156
Horton Plaza builds on positives Moore identified at Disneyland; most
powerfully, movement through Horton Plaza relies on the same cinematographic
conceits found in Walt Disney’s architectural innovations which Moore admired. At
both Disneyland and Horton Plaza, techniques of forced perspective, shifts in scale,
and layering of façades were taken from film (and theater design before that) and
adapted into architecture. Further cinematographic techniques are used to shepherd
visitors through the architecture as if it were a movie, with spaces unfolding as
156
Goldberger, “In Downtown San Diego.”
146
sequential, narrative events. For Disney, the narrative was a specific urbanity of Main
Street that led into adjacent but wildly diverse places of Tomorrowland,
Adventureland, Fantasyland, and Frontierland; for Jerde, the narrative was of
movement through European market streets.
Moore, whose architecture can at times so eschew an interest in form as to be
rendered anonymous, furthered the idea that architects were not rarified heroes but
coordinators of spatial events. Jerde and Disney displayed a similar suspicion of the
hero architect. Like Jerde’s young architects and designers he called “experience
makers” rather than architects, Disney renamed his park’s designers “Imagineers,” a
title that included architects, engineers, and animators. Imagineers developed
Disneyland’s site plan, designed its attractions, and controlled the experience from
storefronts to uniforms to waste management. 157
Jerde also joined in a legacy of architects working in what Moore identified in
“You Have to Pay for the Public Life” as California’s principal architectural
inspirations: liberal interpretations of Mediterranean and Spanish architecture,
modernism, and “the movie camera’s moving eye.” 158 Beyond the historic forms of
Horton Plaza and its fundamentally modern typology, transposing cinematic strategies
from film to architecture is the mall’s most sophisticated architectural move. Jerde
employs scenographic devices, including the strategic layering of real and synthetic
effects and a constant elaboration of detail to generate visual intensity. As you move
157
Katherine W. Rinne, “You Have to Pay for the Public Life,” LA Architecture
(November 1988): 4.
158
Moore, “You Have to Pay,” 175.
147
through the mall, you progress from tightly framed views between archways and
columns (always beckoning you forward), and up stairs and escalators that cross the
armature and provide views forward and back.
Despite the apparent potential for unlimited routes through the mall, the
experience is highly scripted. The journey of the shopper through these scripted spaces
begins to resemble a film shoot. Norman Klein describes the effect as “tourist culture
merging with a consumer-driven personalized daydream. The scripted space is a form
of predestination, where the consumer ‘acts out’ the illusion of free will.” 159
As visitors move through the mall it is as if each is playing the role of both an
audience member and actor in the theater; they are seeing and being seen from an
infinite number of vantage points. Jerde often used the word “story” when describing
his design strategy, allowing that the path is pre-scripted but the individual journey is,
or at least feels, spontaneous. Even if it is a feeling of agency over actual agency, the
feelings of pleasure and of being an active participant in a larger community is real.
Moore granted architects the permission to seek such manufactured pleasure when he
positively presented Disneyland as a powerful public place.
Upon entering Horton Plaza, Jerde achieves a destabilization of both the
visitor’s expectations of what belongs within a downtown (or at least, what one
expects to find in a central business district), as well as a critical reevaluation of how a
mall should be navigated. This ability to misread how an American urban environment
should behave is one of Horton Plaza Mall’s strongest urban gestures. The architecture
points towards so many different historical sources, visitors can make associations
159
Norman M. Klein, “The Electronic Baroque: Jerde Cities,” You Are Here: The
Jerde Partnership International (London: Phaidon Press Limited, 1999), 114.
148
with the mall based on whatever past experiences they bring as individuals. This idea
of using abstractions of history to build meaningful associations, promoted by Moore,
allows the experience of visiting the mall to become both more personal and more
exciting. Guests are not only getting lost in Horton Plaza, they are getting lost in their
imagination.
149
Figure 93 Scenes of life at Horton Plaza. These photographs were taken to
illustrate a review of Horton Plaza focused on the life of mall by
psychologist and professor of architecture Dr. George Rand,
“Architectural Comic Opera” AIA Journal (January 1988). Photographs
by Randall Michelson, 1988.
150
Chapter 5
HORTON PLAZA AS CULMINATION OF MOORE’S POSTMODERNISM
Horton Plaza invented a new brand of urbanism in the heart of San Diego.
Critics, citizens, and visitors alike praised the mall as both an aesthetic triumph and an
economic engine in the beleaguered downtown. It provided the city with an attractive
version of an urban square it had previously lacked, outcompeting suburban
counterparts and meeting Moore’s injunction that architecture’s most important goal
was the creation of meaningful places. In his California fantasy of a European street,
Jerde not only gave the people of San Diego a distinctly pedestrian communal place,
he also produced an architecture that is a product of Moore’s thinking. This chapter
considers Moore’s legacy, speculates on the impact of Horton Plaza as a harbinger of
themed spaces, and acknowledges the limits of privately-owned public space and the
impending destruction of Jerde’s vision at Horton Plaza.
Charles Moore’s Legacy
In the struggle to define postmodernism, it is often easier to state what the
movement is against (modernism) than what it is for. After a lecture by Charles Jencks
at Yale in the spring of 1977, in which Jencks argued the term “post-modern” was, at
best, “negative and evasive,” Moore opined: “Why must I be post anything; why can’t
I be pre-something?” 160
160
Robert A. M. Stern, “After the Modern Movement,” 1977, revised 1978, in
Architecture on the Edge of Postmodernism: Collected Essays 1964-1988 Robert A.
M. Stern, ed. Cynthia Davidson (New Haven and London: Yale University Press,
2009), 107.
151
While his keen eye toward contemporary practice meant he could (and often
did) frame his work in response to modernism’s failings, Moore marked the start of
many new modes of architectural practice. Architects continue to advance Moore’s
insistence on developing place, community, and pluralism through architecture, even
if a distinctly legible “School of Charles Moore” never developed in a manner
comparable to the students and disciples of modernists like Mies van der Rohe (1886-
1969), Walter Gropius (1883-1969), or Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959). Instead,
Moore’s legacy lives on in the principles he espoused and the lessons, radical in his
own time, that are now accepted beliefs.
Many of Moore’s approaches to building and placemaking have become
established practice: engagement and consultation with local communities, explicit
formal and narrative relationships between buildings and regional contexts, and an
emphasis on the creation of strong streetscapes and plazas. Further, Moore’s erudite,
witty, and insistent work advocating pluralism is clear in the enormous stylistic variety
of contemporary architecture. In short, Moore’s belief that the architect’s role is to
build not simply forms, but places, permeates today’s discourse.
Yet to practice in the style of Moore is much more challenging, and much less
common. Kent Bloomer wrote that Moore “created a style as vivid and recognizable
as that of Frank Lloyd Wright or H. H. Richardson before him,” but that “his may be a
style that is very difficult to mimic or perpetuate intact unless we understand and grant
the content and strategy of its order.” For Bloomer, Moore’s architecture “is
essentially responsive and only secondarily formal.” 161 Although Moore pulled
161
Bloomer, 27-28.
152
inspiration from his encyclopedic knowledge of architectural history and his extensive
travels, his built projects were always singular responses rooted in the local condition.
This makes Horton Plaza, so closely associated with the shapes, techniques,
and fantasy of Moore, unique among the architect’s many legacies as it is a literal
manifestation of Moore’s thinking. In designing Horton Plaza, Jerde, like Moore,
deployed a knowledge of architectural history, a sympathetic retooling of San Diego’s
vernacular, practical and affordable construction techniques and materials, and a
collaboration across various arts and trades to bring Horton Plaza into reality. The
resulting place is as imaginative as it is impressive. Like Moore, Jerde achieved a
powerful sense of place through the rearrangement of existing forms into something
new, and presented them in a narrative, sequential unfolding that heightened a sense of
inside and out, an aura of the fairy tale, and sense of architecture as discovery.
The clear debt to Moore found in Horton Plaza makes the absence of any
comment by Moore about Jerde or Horton Plaza all the more glaring. 162 Horton Plaza
was not an insignificant or poorly covered project. It was featured in the major
architecture and design publications that Moore contributed to and voraciously
consumed. Why did he ignore it?
Perhaps Moore found Jerde’s work derivative, as critic George Rand did when
he proposed one manner in which Horton Plaza might be evaluated, the “overheated
ravings of a postmodern mind run amok” where “Jerde and his design team are out-of-
162
Crawford, You are Here, 49. Jerde knew Moore socially, and, according to Jerde,
the two discussed the possibility of collaborating on projects, though no known
partnership occurred and no mention of Jerde appeared in the author’s research into
Moore.
153
control artists substituting tidal waves of visual excitement for genuine
architecture.” 163 When considering his own legacy in the context of a 1986
monograph, Moore made it clear he did not understand his own specific way of
designing to be a replicable system. He wrote:
The buildings in these pages, I submit, should not be seen as signposts

to some Architectural Utopia or some Big Revelation, or to some
perfectible style, but rather as attempts better to gather into structures
the energies of people and places. These attempts come from a belief
that the world contains an astonishing number of wonderful places,
fancy and plain, large and tiny (or somewhere in between). 164
Jerde, Moore, and Themed Space
Moore’s praise of pluralism in architecture was indelibly linked to regionalism
and fantasy, which have become threatened by consumerism and homogeneity. 165 In
many ways, Moore’s praise of Disneyland helped legitimize the later “Disneyfication”
of public space that was a very different conclusion from his own reading of the theme
park. In Variations on a Theme Park, published in 1992, architect and critic Michael
Sorkin decried the erasure of the true public realm in favor of controlled, exclusive
places of perfection—malls, theme parks, private squares—that originated in
Disneyland’s ticketed public sphere. 166 Moore’s acceptance of the synthetic also
163 Rand, 71.

164
Moore, “The Yin and the Yang,” 15.
165
Keim, xxv.
166
Michael Sorkin, ed., Variations on a Theme Park (New York: Hill and Wang,
1992).
154
predated French postmodern philosopher Jean Baudrillard’s visit to Disneyland and
his development of the theory of the hyper-real. 167
Horton Plaza’s enormous success made it a darling of the retail industry, and
Jon Jerde devoted the rest of his career to designing large scale retail developments.
Initially praised in the architectural press, Jerde’s later work was ridiculed, and then
largely ignored. Horton Plaza was singular among Jerde’s buildings for its abstraction
and combination of high-style postmodernism and commerce. Jerde projects of the
1990s, like Universal CityWalk, The Fremont Street Experience, or Mall of America
were more literally themed environments. Unlike Horton Plaza, the façades of
CityWalk are barely abstracted; instead, they are miniatures and reproductions, “a
Hollywood version of Hollywood in Hollywood” wrote one European critic after
CityWalk’s 1993 opening, noting that “even before the original Hollywood is entirely
gone, it has been made into a themed version of itself, and just around the corner.” 168
An onslaught of themed stores, restaurants, and shopping centers in the 1990s
further split apart the world of high architecture and retail. By 1995 Horton Plaza had
its own themed attractions, notably the glittering world of movie stars vis-à-vis Planet
Hollywood and the safari of Banana Republic, with a Jeep ‘crashing’ through the
façade and live palm trees inside. Compared to the earlier Horton Plaza storefronts,
which relied on graphic and postmodern architectural solutions to create interest and
167
Simon Sadler, “You (Still) Have to Pay for the Public Life,” Places (January 2016),
https://placesjournal.org/article/you-still-have-to-pay-for-the-public-life/#ref_15.
168
Vanstiphout, Review.
155
dynamism, these more literally themed stores were a move away from abstraction
toward simulation.
While Horton Plaza helped to usher in an era of themed retail environments, it
in and of itself was not themed, at least not in the way themes came to be understood
by the turn of the century. 169 Instead, Horton Plaza relies on condensed and juxtaposed
images of urbanity that are abstracted into familiar but ambiguous architectural
images, coordinated by color, textiles, and spatial complexity. Jerde’s references were
varied but pulled together into a cohesive and spatially sophisticated whole, all in
service of the mall’s creation of profit-generating privately-owned public place but
also in conversation with the high-art postmodern aesthetics of the era.
Charles Jencks concludes his 1986 book What is Post-Modernism? with the
observation that “Like Communists seeing a bourgeois ‘counter-revolution’ behind
every demand for freedom, Modernists—in all their ‘Late’ and ‘Neo’ phases—find a
‘Disneyland’ behind every attempt at contextual building.” 170 The Disneyland that
Charles Moore praised offered “a whole architectural education in all the things that
matter—community and reality, private memory and inhabitation, as well as some
technical lessons in propinquity and choreography.” 171 The Disneyland that inspired
later themed attractions provided more formulaic and less experiential lessons.
169
Mark Gottdiener, The Theming of America: American Dreams, Media Fantasies,
and Themed Environments (Cambridge, MA: Westview Press, 2001).
170
Charles Jencks, What is Post-Modernism? (London: Academy Group Ltd., 1986),
72.
171
Charles Moore with Peter Becker and Regula Campbell, The City Observed: Los
Angeles, A Guide to Its Architecture and Landscapes (New York: Vintage Books,
1984), 35.
156
Charles Moore on Malls and Public Places
Horton Plaza succeeded in a particularly Moorean manner: bringing
architecture and fantasy into the real world with the goal of forming meaningful,
pleasurable public space. Yet Moore questioned the ability of the mall, as a typology,
to form public realms. As he told an interviewer in 1991:
The longing is there on people’s part for a village with some intimate
situation that the people can all feel a part of, which they can’t do with
your typical shopping mall because it doesn’t include anything but
shopping. I think we are going to have to come to some structure for
our cities that we can feel connected with a part of. 172
Outside of Moore’s wide understanding of what might be considered
architecture, the commercialism of the mall typology has historically made them
pariahs of architectural criticism and theory. Even in their heyday in the 1980s, malls
were rarely considered serious architecture. Judged from the point of high culture,
malls have been condemned for substituting illusion for reality, and reactionary
nostalgia in place of architecture.
Ernest Hahn attempted to remedy the limits of the mall’s retail focus by
incorporating theaters, nightlife, dining, and street entertainment, while Jerde’s design
engaged with the architectural zeitgeist. Horton Plaza attempted to realize the civic
goals of Victor Gruen’s shopping centers as more perfect city centers. Yet Moore’s
critique extends beyond these attempts to enhance the resolutely commercial venture:
Horton Plaza, like any mall, is not truly public space, and fails to provide for what
Moore called the “political experience.” 173 Just as you cannot protest within
172
Moore and Luxemburg, 328.
173
157
Disneyland, you cannot launch a revolution in Horton Plaza; the security guards would
usher you out. Fundamentally, Horton Plaza is not public space.
Moore’s pluralism accepted the realities of contemporary capitalism in the
creation of architecture, even if he was frustrated by the necessary compromises this
entailed. The title of “You Have to Pay for the Public Life” comes from Moore’s
critical observation about Disneyland: “Curiously, for a public place, Disneyland is
not free. You buy tickets at the gate. But then, Versailles cost someone a great deal of
money, too. Now, as then, you have to pay for the public life.” 174
But because of this fee, “Everything works, the way it doesn’t seem to
anymore in the world outside.” Disneyland and Horton Plaza shared a sanitized, safe,
and idealized version of urban space. They even shared the same demographic of
employees, the “Nice-looking, handsomely costumed young people [that] sweep away
the gum wrappers almost before they fall to the spotless pavement” that Moore
observed at Disneyland.
Ultimately, the essay argued for an interpretation of architecture as a buttress
of life, culture, and community, in circumstances that are not always the architect’s
own choosing and with outcomes the architect may not have intended. This
postmodern attitude underscored a pluralism that is not only stylistic, but cultural,
economic, and political. 175 As Moore said, when considering another architect’s work,
“I take this ability to tolerate and accept opposing points of view, to include nuances,
174
175 Sadler, “You (Still) Have to Pay.”
158
and to ennoble reconciliation by removing its urgency, as a sign of a high-level of
civilization.” 176
Horton Plaza and the Twenty-First Century
Like Disneyland, where the ticket price admits the guest into a world of
community and pleasure, Horton Plaza makes up for its lack of true publicness with
architectural exuberance. The mall has always been a tourist magnet as much for its
shops as its architecture. In early reports of the mall, the architecture was constantly
highlighted; there were architectural tours of the mall led by local guides, and even
today, as the mall stands largely empty of retailers, there are still tourists wandering
the ramps and bridges and enjoying the paper fantasy of Jerde’s urban allegory. These
are not the same tourists seeking out dead malls or abandoned urbanism; there is still
177
real pleasure to be found in the form of the mall.
When Moore confronted a similar failure of maintenance and development at
his Piazza d’Italia, he turned the argument that the project somehow failed on its head.
Describing his joy at hearing homeless people were the only ones using his poorly-
maintained Piazza d’Italia, which he understood to be “in a fully Latin state of
disrepair,” Moore was not distressed but instead found it to be “welcome confirmation
that this public space is not just flexible but special, and able (I think) to support the
particular needs of groups with very different needs.” 178
176Charles Moore, “Learning from Adam’s House,” Architectural Record 154:2

(August 1973), 43, reprinted in Keim, 218.
177 Rowe, “Focus: Horton Plaza.”
178 Moore, “Ten Years Later,” 310.
159
Moore’s projects like Kresge College, the Santa Barbara Faculty Club, and the
housing at Church Street South are inanimate stage sets until activated by people. The
spontaneous dramas of daily life are played out within and in front of these buildings,
and complete the architectural whole. Without people, Moore’s projects, particularly
the Piazza d’Italia, can look as sad as they do spectacular. The same is true of Horton
Plaza.
Without people, as it now exists, an integral element of Jerde’s plan is missing.
Just as, when working on the model of Horton Plaza, Jerde said he “glued on” the
architecture and had his experience makers add “little bake sales to imply life in this
place,” Horton Plaza’s sense of place came from its use as a living, moving thing. 179
Jerde adopted much the same language as Moore surrounding placemaking,
commenting that “relating to the common man in an uncommon way is the goal” of
his practice. 180
For all the success of Horton Plaza in its first two decades, when the mall
exceeded financial benchmarks and acted as a tourist destination comparable to
SeaWorld, the San Diego Zoo, and Balboa Park, in 2018 The San Diego Union-
Tribune declared, “Everyone agrees, Horton Plaza is dead.” 181 What killed the mall?
The wounds were many. Nationally, online shopping, changing consumer habits, and a
179 Anderton, You Are Here, 9.

180 Anderton, You Are Here, 1.
181 Rowe, “Focus: Horton Plaza;” Jennifer van Grove, “Should Horton Plaza be
preserved?” The San Diego Union-Tribune, December 16, 2018,
https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/business/growth-development/sd-fi-horton-
plaza-historical-significance-20181216-story.html.
160
complete reorganization of American retail markets led to thousands of mall closures.
At Horton Plaza, Westfield Group (who purchased the mall in 1998) began to stop
renewing leases or sign new tenants into the mall at the same time suburban
Westfield-owned superregional malls were renovated and syphoned shoppers away
from downtown. 182 Increased tensions at the U.S. border crossing with Tijuana led to
a major decline in international shoppers, and the problem present at the mall since its
opening in 1985 continued to plague the complex: for all the success of the world
created within the mall’s armature, the building mass impeded meaningful interaction
between Horton Plaza and the rest of downtown.
The world inside Horton Plaza is a visual feast. But while the mall succeeded
in bringing shoppers back downtown and creating its own rich environment inside the
complex, the megastructure fails to integrate with the real city. People drive in and
drive out, and while you can walk in, the mall appears from most sides to turn its back
to the city. This decision, thought to be necessary at the time of its construction to
provide security from the uncontrolled city streets around it, has become one of the
mall’s greatest liabilities.
Horton Plaza turns its back on the neighboring Gaslamp Quarter and treats its
namesake park as almost an afterthought. Horton Plaza’s economic success played a
key part in revitalizing the Gaslamp Quarter, yet the mall’s architecture now prohibits
182 Roger Showley, “What’s next for Westfield’s Horton Plaza?” The San Diego
Union-Tribune, December 26, 2017,
https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/business/growth-development/sd-fi-
hortonfuture-20171226-story.html.
161
a symbiotic relationship between the two retail areas of downtown. The fantasy
downtown and the actual downtown refused to be meaningfully connected.
As vacancies increased, maintenance of the mall became an issue and repairs
to the stucco and tiling throughout the mall were left unfinished. In a lawsuit against
Westfield filed by Jimbo’s, a local organic grocery chain that moved into much of the
ground floor of Horton Plaza in 2013, the store argued that “Westfield’s complete
disinterest in maintaining Horton Plaza was appropriately demonstrated when it did
not even bother to decorate the mall for the holiday season in 2017.” 183
While the Union-Tribune could confidently claim that “Horton Plaza is dead,”
the paper reported less agreement on what to do with the mall’s unique aesthetics:
“Whether or not the center’s postmodern essence should live on for the sake of
posterity, however, is a matter that’s creating animus between historians, city staffers
and the plaza’s new owner, Stockdale Capital Partners.” 184
In May of 2019, the City Council voted unanimously to allow Stockdale to
proceed with its renovations, converting Horton Plaza into the Campus at Horton, a
mixed-use development focused on attracting technology companies. 185 Beyond
eliminating department stores in favor of office space, and halving the overall retail
square footage, the proposals from Los Angeles-based Rios Clementi Hale Studios
involve scraping off the stucco façades, demolishing the bridges and towers, and
183 Potter, “The fall of Horton Plaza.”

184 Rowe, “Focus: Horton Plaza.”
185Jennifer van Grove, “Horton Plaza tech campus is a go,” The San Diego Union-
Tribune, May 20, 2019 https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/business/growth-
development/story/2019-05-20/horton-plaza-tech-campus-is-a-go
162
recladding the superstructure in materials popular today: glass, wood, concrete and
steel, deployed in a palette of cool neutrals across smooth, planar surfaces. Extensive
gardens and green roofs are also proposed.
While the redesign retains certain key aspects of Jerde’s design, including the
diagonal armature and its set-back, curved pathways, and does keep the monumental
black-and-white triangular palazzo, there is none of Jerde’s colorful screen work
present. In place of a highly specific, complex architecture, the proposed changes
genericize the complex in line with the trends of today.
The loss of Horton Plaza’s architectural character comes at a moment of
historical reflection concerning postmodernism, with increasing popular interest in the
aesthetics of the movement. Horton Plaza embodies a unique moment in architecture
and cultural history, when the theories of postmodernism and America’s love affair
with the mall intersected to produce a work of distinct, and successful, commercial
architecture.
Charles Moore, the consummate postmodernist, summarized the ultimate
purpose of architecture as such:
What all of this is about is inhabitation, the human act of being

somewhere where we are protected, even engaged, in a space ennobled
by our own presence. Inhabitation is a powerful reality that architecture
is supposed to be all about but more often isn’t. 186
At its best, postmodern architecture brought an array of stylistic, aesthetic, and
symbolic richness to bear on a pluralistic architecture that communicated with and
participated in the richness of the age in which it was built. Postmodernism matched
186 Moore, The City Observed, 38.
163
the intensity and variety of the world around it. Moore argued for architecture to
engage an increasingly pluralistic, technological, electronic world, and Horton Plaza
squarely asserted itself as relevant, fashionable, and placemaking. It was a place where
one wanted to stop, leave the car, and participate.
164
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Appendix
PERMISSION LETTERS
172
173
174
Kevin Keim, Director of the Charles Moore Foundations, concerning plans and
drawings of Charles Moore:
Kevin Keim, concerning the fantasy drawing of Charles Moore:
175
Kevin Keim concerning photographs from the archives of Charles Moore:
176
177
178
179
180
181
Images from the Stumpe’s family trip to the 1984 World’s Fair Wonderwall,
documented on their blog here:
http://jaxstumpes.blogspot.com/1984/09/1984-new-orleans-la-928-301984.html
182
183
184
185
186

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JON JERDE’S HORTON PLAZA MALL:

IN THE TRADITION OF CHARLES W. MOORE

A thesis submitted to the Faculty of the University of Delaware in partial fulfillment

© 2020 Kevin Adkisson

IN THE TRADITION OF CHARLES W. MOORE

Humanities Institute Summer Research Fellowship in Material Culture Studies that

I am grateful to my advisor, Sandy Isenstadt, for his keen architectural eye,

Wiggins, Murphy Thomas Temple, and Amy Griffin.

I must also recognize Kent Bloomer, ornament maestro, professor, and

thesis, and for being a mentor, employer, and friend.

LIST OF FIGURES ...................................................................................................... vii

Thesis Structure .................................................................................................. 4

1 THE HORTON PLAZA REDEVELOPMENT PROJECT ............................... 6

2 CHARLES W. MOORE’S POSTMODERNISM ............................................ 26

The Rise of Postmodernism and Charles Moore .............................................. 26

3 VICTOR GRUEN, THE MALL, AND THE CITY......................................... 57

Victor Gruen’s Vision of Retail and the City ................................................... 58

4 THE DESIGN AND EXPERIENCE OF HORTON PLAZA .......................... 79

Redesigning the Redevelopment ...................................................................... 79

Charles Moore’s Legacy................................................................................. 151

REFERENCES ........................................................................................................... 165

PERMISSION LETTERS .............................................................................. 172

Figure 3 Downtown San Diego, ca. 1973. ............................................................. 13

Figure 4 Project Boundaries, Horton Plaza Redevelopment Project, October

Figure 5 Illustrative Concept Plan, Horton Plaza Redevelopment Project,

Figure 6 Exploded Isometric, Horton Plaza Redevelopment Project, ca. 1975.

Figure 9 Sea Ranch Condominium 1, 1963-1965. Moore Lyndon Turnbull

Figure 10 Courtyard, Sea Ranch Condominium 1, 1963-1965. MLTW, Sonoma

Figure 11 Unit 9, Sea Ranch Condominium 1, 1963-1965. MLTW, Sonoma

Figure 12 Faculty Club, University of California at Santa Barbara, 1966-1968.

Figure 13 Dining room, Faculty Club, University of California at Santa Barbara,

Figure 14 Second floor plan, Faculty Club, University of California at Santa

Figure 17 Kresge College, University of California at Santa Cruz, 1966-1974.

Figure 18 Kresge College, University of California at Santa Cruz, 1966-1974.

Figure 19 Kresge College, University of California at Santa Cruz, 1966-1974.

Figure 20 Kresge College, University of California at Santa Cruz, 1966-1974.

Figure 21 Model, Piazza d’Italia, 1975-1978. Urban Innovations Group and

Figure 22 Piazza d’Italia, 1975-1978. Urban Innovations Group & Charles W.

Figure 23 Piazza d’Italia, 1975-1978. Urban Innovations Group & Charles W.

Figure 25 Seaside, Charles W. Moore, hand-colored lithograph, 7” x 5,” ca.

Figure 26 Church Street South housing development, 1966-1969, demolished

Figure 27 Church Street South housing development, 1966-1969, demolished

Figure 28 Church Street South housing development, 1966-1969, demolished

Figure 32 Postcard views of Burdick Street Pedestrian Mall/Kalamazoo Mall,

Figure 35 Ghirardelli Square, 1964. William Wurster of Wurster, Bernardi and

Figure 36 Quincy Market at Faneuil Hall Marketplace, 1976. Benjamin

Figure 37 Faneuil Hall Marketplace, 1976. Benjamin Thompson Associates,

Figure 38 Faneuil Hall Marketplace, 1976. Benjamin Thompson Associates,

Figure 43 Model, Horton Plaza, ca. 1981-1982 ....................................................... 88

Figure 44 Model, Horton Plaza, ca. 1981-1982 ....................................................... 89

Figure 45 Perspective drawing, Horton Plaza, ca. 1982-1985 ................................. 92

Figure 46 Horton Plaza opening, Aug. 9, 1985 ....................................................... 95

Figure 48 Isometric drawing, Horton Plaza, ca. 1981-1985 .................................... 98

Figure 51 Aerial view of Horton Plaza, ca. 2010 .................................................. 101

Figure 52 Sienna Cathedral, 1196-1358. Giovanni di Agostino, Giovanni Pisano,

Figure 55 Horton Plaza “Palazzo” pavilion, 1985 ................................................. 105

Figure 57 San Gimignano, Italy ............................................................................. 106

Figure 58 San Gimignano, Italy ............................................................................. 106

Figure 59 Wonderwall, 1984, dismantled. Charles W. Moore and William

Figure 62 Temporary installation of scaffolding, fabric, and pictograph structure

Figure 63 Color palette by Sussman ...................................................................... 112

Figure 64 Color palette by Sussman ...................................................................... 112

Figure 65 Banners by Sussman .............................................................................. 114

Figure 66 Banners by Sussman .............................................................................. 114

Jon Jerde's Horton Plaza Mall Comercialismo Contextual Na Tradição de Charles W. Moore

Jon Jerde's Horton Plaza Mall Comercialismo Contextual Na Tradição de Charles W. Moore