[ Lost in the Landscape ]

a retail landscape

Here’s a post in com­mem­o­ra­tion of today, Black Fri­day, the day after Thanks­giv­ing when the hol­i­day shop­ping sea­son gets going in earnest.

When one of South­ern California’s first Ikea stores opened at the Tustin Mar­ket­place in Orange County twen­ty­ish years ago I was excited. I’d been over­sat­u­rated with the cheap, ugly depart­ment store mer­chan­dise that was avail­able in my bud­get range at the time, and the sim­ple and ratio­nal Ikea designs wafted in like a breath of Nordic oxygen.

The build­ings of the Tustin Mar­ket­place were dif­fer­ent from any­thing I’d seen at the time. They were huge and painted in intense col­ors of the earth. Although the archi­tec­ture shared some of the color sen­si­bil­i­ties of post­mod­ern archi­tec­ture of the 1980s, it was noth­ing like what was being done in sub­ur­bia at the time. The cen­tral land­scap­ing was also dis­tinc­tive: geo­met­ric, spiky, sculp­tural. Once again, this wasn’t straight out of the rule­book for how you do land­scap­ing for a sub­ur­ban shop­ping center.

I had seen designs by the Mex­i­can archi­tect Ricardo Legor­reta in archi­tec­ture mag­a­zines, and the com­plex in Orange County reminded me a lot of his work. Lit­tle did I know until fairly recently that he actu­ally was respon­si­ble for design­ing the com­plex. On my last trip up to Los Ange­les I made a point of stop­ping by the stores on the way home. Unfor­tu­nately, the Tustin Mar­ket­place hadn’t aged gracefully.

The Ikea was long gone. One of the main roads into the com­plex dead-ended at a stark earth-red wall, eas­ily forty or fifty feet tall, that bore the ghostly remains of where a Linens ‘n’ Things store sign had been removed. I’ve never vis­ited the pyra­mids of either Egypt or Cen­tral Amer­ica, but this is how I imag­ine it would feel: over­pow­er­ing, des­o­late, scaled to some over­in­flated sense of human self-importance.

It was late on a Sun­day morn­ing and most of the remain­ing stores were just open­ing up. It’s the time of day when you’re con­fronted with the acres of blank, blank, blank asphalt that make up so many of this country’s retail land­scapes. This is land that lies bar­ren and unused for fifty weeks out of the year and only springs into use for those few and intense days of hol­i­day shopping.

But not every­thing was over­whelm­ing bleak­ness. The park­ing area next to the food court sported this dense grove of palm trees. The space made me think of the agri­cul­tural groves where dates are grown Indio, south of Palm Springs, in their sense of grace­ful geom­e­try over­head and shel­ter from the ele­ments. Pretty good for a retail park­ing lot, I thought.

A few of the geo­met­ri­cal land­scap­ing details remained from the orig­i­nal design. In the first of these, the orig­i­nal slop­ing lawn had been replaced by one of the arti­fi­cial lawn replace­ment prod­ucts out there. It looks real enough when you’re zoom­ing by in a car, but even with its hype of look­ing bet­ter than Astro­turf, it’s noth­ing I’d want to have to stare at from the win­dows of the house.

And here, in the part­ing shot of the shop­ping cen­ter, a row of white mono­liths marks the tran­si­tion from the park­ing lot to the pub­lic street beyond.

So, is the Tustin Mar­ket­place a great exam­ple of archi­tec­ture or land­scape design? I’d argue no. Even though it’s right on Inter­state 5, I wouldn’t go out of your way to visit it any­more unless you need a snack or bath­room break from the free­way. But the com­plex was dif­fer­ent in its day, and I give it points for that. Addi­tion­ally, the land­scap­ing didn’t require much water to sus­tain it.

Inter­est­ingly, Ricardo Legoretta was behind the late 1980s redesign of Per­sh­ing Square in Los Ange­les, one of the city’s his­toric open spaces and a past gath­er­ing point for a diverse mix of the pop­u­la­tion. Sev­eral years ago I attended a con­fer­ence at the Bilt­more Hotel, which is located on the square. Even at that time Legorreta’s huge slabs of con­crete that had been painted pur­ple looked hos­tile and dated. Per­sh­ing Square was another of the architect’s pub­lic spaces that hadn’t aged grace­fully. There’s now talk of replac­ing the design with some­thing else.

November 28 2008 | Categories: gardening • landscape • landscape design • places | Tags: architecture • Black Friday • drought-tolerant landscaping • retail • Ricardo Legorreta • shopping • suburbia • Tustin Marketplace | 3 Comments »