Back then, it was the haircut of Flock of Seagulls’ frontman as a mall—angular, wild to look at, confusing to old people. It was even perplexing to young people, who loved every single thing about malls. It was a real-life recreation of M.C. Escher’s painting, Relativity, with stairs that went everywhere and nowhere. Trying to escape the Horton Plaza parking garage was a form of trauma unique to San Diego, a rite of passage. Go ahead, take this ayahuasca and try to remember if you parked on avocado or watermelon.
Before Amazon turned capitalism into a lonely pocket kiosk, all things were bought in a teeming social arena—in malls. And there was no mall like Horton Plaza. As it now sits in holdership, awaiting someone to love it or use it for parts, it is due a proper salute. For a brief moment in time, it put San Diego—long considered California’s affable, unserious, uncultured vacation spot with a ceremonial heart and design agnosticism—at the international center of cutting-edge pop art, design, architecture, and commerce.
Why? Because between writing sci-fi novels about book burners and vagrants with tattoos that predicted our dystopian downfall, Ray Bradbury took time to build a mall in San Diego.
Factually, Ernest W. Hahn spearheaded it, and architect Jon Jerde built it. The American shopping mall was invented by architect Victor Gruen (Southdale Center in Edina, Minnesota, opened in 1956), but Hahn ran with the idea and deserves a co-credit for the proliferation of the retail-stimulation farms. He created an armada of them across the US, which poured gasoline on the era of pre-internet capitalism and were the only way American teens learned to flirt. Through Hahn’s work, the world received epic ’80s cinema like Fast Times at Ridgemont High, which was also written by a San Diegan (Cameron Crowe) and based on a real school in San Diego (Clairemont High). Hahn gave us Fashion Valley in 1969, followed by UTC in 1977.
Then he was tasked with injecting some verve back to a nearly seven block grid of downtown—which, in the early ’80s, had devolved into a seedier form of capitalism. For one of America’s youngest cities that yearned to create its own history, the site was a crucial one. It’s where Alonzo Horton—a cattle, gold, and ice man who’d moved here because he’d developed a cough—opened Horton House Hotel in 1870. (San Diego was thought to be one of the healthiest places in the world.) It had a plaza and fountain out front (still there, restored in 2016) that became the epicenter of social life in San Diego, and the manger of a modern city.
In the 1980s, malls were silly and essential boot camps for American social life and consumerism. Young minds would enter, be dizzied by lights and music and the stimulation of object desire, and learn to need what they didn’t need, which is as essential to adult life as puberty itself.
That’s the thing about need: With enough neon and the right pop song, you can invent it.
Once seeded, it develops into a lifelong craving for shinier things. Shinier things require education, hustle, hard work, innovation, advanced degrees, palm grease, socioeconomic mountaineering, nepotism, extreme dream jockeying… They require money. So it’s not a stretch that the lure of Madonna’s new tape at Sam Goody and the racy sex jeans of Jordache (now a Playstation from Sony or polyester sex joggers from Vuori, respectively) are why people work hard enough to eventually launch rockets and crack genomes. (And sure, altruism also plays a part, but the number of Rivians in biotech parking lots suggests a love of material objects is at least partially fueling the cure for cancer.)
When hired to design Horton Plaza, Jerde was an up-and-coming architect. As part of his design process, he asked Bradbury—one of the country’s wildly imaginative authors, who’d risen to fame with his 1953 sci-fi classic Fahrenheit 451—to write an essay about what a social environment should look like. Bradbury obliged with “The Aesthetics of Lostness.” Inspired by the charm of European villages—which were built long before things like “traffic logic”—the author described places where you’d wander down little nooks and crannies, secret alleys that went nowhere. The joy was in getting lost in a safe environment.
That thought guided Jerde’s designs, and explains why the mall was such a glorious mind flayer. Opened in 1985, it had the pattern-orgiastic, rando-text, color-rave vibe of an ’80s album cover—created by environmental graphic designer Deborah Sussman and architect Paul Prejza (the three of them had designed the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics a year before). It was like shopping in a pinball machine that had been put together using different parts of other pinball machines. It was a colonnade suggesting Hellenic intellectual grandeur here; a wild splatter of neon that wouldn’t be out of place at a coke party on Duran Duran’s tour bus there.
And, like a pinball machine, you (you’re the ball) were sent wandering this way and that—up ramps that made no sense. You’d walk up to level three and for no discernible reason at all, find yourself on level six, the store you were aiming for mocking you from below. Stairs just…appeared, then went nowhere. One of the great social effects of Horton Plaza was the sheer number of people leaning over railings, peering down to see where their journey had gone wrong. Looking for a North Star, a landmark, something to undo the vertigo. Jerde’s design used ’80s people with very tall hair as a constant, fleshy statement piece.
By the time you were done, you were so disoriented that you couldn’t remember which fruit or vegetable you parked on. The parking garage famously eschewed numbered levels for various produce. In Jerde’s world, two was a carrot. Five was an orange. Very helpful math became the randomness of a CSA box. For even more fun, stairwells and elevators only opened on odd- or even-level floors, ensuring you never exited on the right food group. When you finally emerged, you wouldn’t be surprised to see Frank Zappa manning the toll booth, mad grin and all.
And because of this, there was unmitigated joy about the chaos of Horton Plaza. An aliveness. It forced you to be present. You needed to pay attention or you might get stuck here forever, your loved ones coming to claim you as you huddle in a blubbering mess in Nordstrom’s return department. (In the ’80s, even in a snowstorm or apocalypse, anyone could find the Nordstrom return department—the most welcoming, forgiving place in capitalism.)
Horton was the Radiohead of malls, the Tyler the Creator of malls, the Bjork-in-a-swan-dress of malls. Jerde saw a vast wasteland of mind-numbing, milktoast-colored shopping centers across America, all governed by the practical laws of mall-goer psychographics (keep merchandise at eye level, have kiosks with orderly and clear directions to desired stores)—and went totally, artfully apeshit.
He focused on keeping people’s attention when they weren’t actively spending money inside stores. The mall itself became an attraction, a game to be played, with multiple levels of mastery. Which honestly did more to honor Alonzo Horton’s original vision of the space—a gathering place for the city, a social attraction—than a regular mall ever would have. Jerde designed the in-between moments, just like he would do a few years later at Disneyland, where he helped create fantastical environments for people waiting in line and exiting rides, with the theory that the ride—or the Macy’s—shouldn’t be the only attraction of a place. Everything could be a joy or a brightly colored frustration.
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In doing so, he made San Diego the epicenter of architectural pop art. After him, malls were never the same. Horton Plaza gave mall architects across the world renewed creative license. Jerde went on to design some of the world’s biggest totems of commerce—Canal City Hakata in Japan, Fremont Street in Las Vegas, Universal CityWalk in LA, Mall of America in Minneapolis.
Horton Plaza started it all.
