Architect shaped urban spaces

Designer helped oversee look of ’84 Olympic Games.

LOS ANGELES — Architect Jon Jerde spent 10 years of his career designing standard, suburban shopping malls. Which he grew to hate.

When he got a chance to bust out of the basic box, he came up with multilevel, multi-building malls to which he added bridges, arches, winding pathways, vast patios, towers, digitally controlled fountains and huge multimedia screens.

Jerde’s “experience” malls and related projects - including Universal CityWalk in Los Angeles, Horton Plaza in San Diego, the Mall of America outside Minneapolis, and the Bellagio hotel complex and Fremont Street Experience in Las Vegas - are his reimagining of the classic town square.

“He blew open the shopping mall and transformed it into a lively urban environment which attracts people, lots of people,” Richard Weinstein, the former dean of the University of California, Los Angeles’ school of architecture and urban planning, once said.

Jerde, 75, who also helped oversee the design of the 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Games, died Monday at his home in the Brentwood neighborhood of Los Angeles, according to an announcement from his wife, architect Janice Ambry Jerde. He had cancer and Alzheimer’s disease.

He had been absent since 2013 from his firm Jerde Partnership - headquartered off Venice Beach, with branch offices in Shanghai, Hong Kong and Seoul.

In 1963, the Los Angeles Times ran an article headlined “USC’s Jon Jerde Wins Architectural Fellowship.” The student, who had grown up in remote areas of the country as his father traveled to oil rig jobs, had won a $3,500 award to travel and study in Europe.

The trip changed his life.

“Europe was a revelation,” he said in a 1988 Times interview, with people from all walks of life going to city centers to “stroll aimlessly” and “gather, mingle and interact.”

He aimed to re-create that in the United States, where many downtowns had fallen on hard times. But at his first major job after graduation he designed malls for suburbs. He needed the work, but complained that no one would let him try his blow-up-the-box ideas.

In 1977, prominent mall developer Ernie Hahn called his bluff - he hired Jerde to design a mall for a dilapidated area of downtown San Diego.

Jerde, who went out on his own, came up with a multilevel mall that he likened to several acts of a play. “It was high variety, so people would be enchanted by moving through this place,” he said of the Horton Plaza project. “It had bridges and platforms and terraces and all sorts of things no one had ever seen before in these types of environments.”

“Very quickly, it became clear that the big deal was the space between the buildings,” Jerde told the San Diego Union in 2005. “The openings are more important than the walls.”

It took eight years for the project to be completed.

In the meantime, Jerde was given the job of overseeing the look of the 1984 Games.