To enter one of architect Jon Jerde's developments is to stroll through a metropolitan kaleidoscope. From Universal CityWalk in LA to Canal City Hakata in Fukuoka, Japan, and the Beursplein in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, his flashy, ultracapitalist venues thrill passersby, attract streams of tourists, and horrify the cultural elite.
"The public sector stopped making public space a long time ago," says Jerde. "So I began with the shit of architecture - the bottom 40 feet, what no serious architect cares about: retail, laundromats, pet hospitals, gas stations - and used it to create the communal again."
The just-published You Are Here (Phaidon Press) supports his claim. The monograph chronicles his rise from urban decorator (he dressed up LA for the 1984 Summer Olympic Games) to "place maker" of hyperreal shopping centers (Mall of America) to reinventor of the casino resort. "Bellagio's my Bilbao," Jerde says of his 1998 Las Vegas extravaganza.
But You Are Here doesn't end there. It also gives glimpses of the architect's vision for "The Third Millennium City" - like his concept for Japan's Makuhari Town Center. Though that development fell victim to the Asian financial crisis, elements of the design inspired plans for Namba, an urban village under construction in Osaka, and for the Core Pacific City in Taipei. Core Pacific City dramatically encapsulates Jerde's ideals for future metropolitan centers. There's an oasis - in this case, a spherical world within a world. There's more than a little urban jungle. And, most of all, it's a hive of activities.
"The 'art' of citymaking disappeared with the segregation-by-use theories of contemporary real estate," Jerde has written. "Instead of city, we now have: office park, cultural center, government district, et cetera. Our largest projects have reassembled the city from the current disarray."
Part of that disarray, Jerde contends, stems from the common belief that the city and nature are separate, distinct. At lectures, he likes to show a series of slides - the Manhattan skyline, Monument Valley, an African termite mound - and then ask, "Where is the edge of nature?" It's a trick question. "There is no edge," Jerde maintains. "Everything is connected. Architecture that fails to express this isn't worth doing."
While he concedes that "great cities become so by many layers of anonymous editing over time," it's clear that his public works reflect the ambitions of a master planner. Yet unlike traditional civic planners, Jerde is not preoccupied with social engineering. His passion is for rendering fantasies of big-city life - and the gaudier, the better.
