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BREAKING THE MOLD

La Cittadella brings a vertical open-air center to Kawasaki, Japan

BY NANCY COHEN

The open-air center has taken a step forward — and several steps up. What may be the first vertical open-air center has opened at La Cittadella, an entertainment and retail complex in Kawasaki, Japan.

In that industrial port city, set between Tokyo and Yokohama, the architect, Venice, Calif.-based Jerde Partnership, has essentially turned a multilevel building inside out. In lieu of an interior corridor, an outdoor path winds up and around the project, providing access to all tenants from the outside.

The design advances Jerde Partnership’s mission to reinvent the commercial sphere. The firm was an early advocate of nontraditional, “experiential” architecture that broke out of the mall box, mixed the uses and embraced the outdoors. Horton Plaza, Jerde’s first mall project to embody these principles, opened in 1985 and helped resuscitate San Diego — like Kawasaki, a port city that had seen better days.

La Cittadella is, in a sense, a ready-made village with its own roads and plazas, much the way lifestyle and New Urbanist centers are. But unlike other urban developments, where visitors disappear from view upon entering buildings, La Cittadella’s design keeps luring them out. The 255,000-square-foot project comprises a series of structures of varying heights, each with irregularly shaped floors of differing sizes, which are linked above street level by open-air pedestrian bridges.

Meandering through much of the development is the outdoor path. Fifteen feet wide, it climbs at a 4 percent slope for 853 feet, rising from a street-level plaza and fountain, crossing beneath bridges, looping back on itself and opening onto landscaped overlooks and terraces before reaching the uppermost level. The path accomplishes several related goals, explains Arthur Benedetti, vice president and project designer at Jerde Partnership. First, it leads visitors past each storefront all the way to the top of the complex. As important, it fosters a vibrant street life and lends an air of anticipation and discovery as it slips from sight under bridges and around corners.

“If we’d done a normal multilevel complex, we’d see lots of balconies and escalators, but few people at the top,” Benedetti said. “Here, the path draws people through, and the walking is effortless. People are surprised when they’ve reached the top at how high they’ve come. And it gives us people walking by, disappearing and reappearing, wanting to see what’s down the line — a very three-dimensional experience.”

The property on which La Cittadella sits has been a longtime destination for movies, music and other entertainment. Owned by cinema operator Misu Entertainment, it is home to Japan’s first multiplex, Cinecittà, which takes its name from Rome’s famed filmmaking district. It is also the site of Club Città (“Club City”), a leading Tokyo-area music venue that since 1988 has hosted concerts by performers ranging from B.B. King to The Kinks, from The Ramones to Radiohead.

Misu sought to intensify and expand the property’s use with a redevelopment that both improved the existing facilities and added a plethora of restaurants, a smattering of shops and a unifying design.

“The idea was to create an urban village as the core of this entertainment district,” Benedetti said.

The challenge was to find a way to build densely and vertically — essential in Japan, where acreage is limited — without stacking floors on top of each other into a rectangular box.

The terraced hill towns of Italy, where narrow streets scale mountains by meandering up and switching back on themselves, inspired a solution. (They also helped La Cittadella, which means “citadel,” extend the Italian-themed brand of the project’s preexisting components, Cinecittà and Club Città.)

But in contrast to the Italian countryside, Kawasaki is flat. So instead of carving a town into a hill, the architect built one up against the new and expanded cineplex, creating a vertical backdrop for the project and at the same time masking the 12-screen theater’s blank facade. La Cittadella’s central component, the five-level structure that abuts the cineplex, opened last November. Its 53,000 square feet of shops and restaurants line the serpentine path that leads from a plaza at its base to the cineplex entrance at the top.

The overall redevelopment has been unfolding in stages. The first step was to clear the way for the Cittadella village by demolishing an existing hotel and the nightclub, then rebuilding the club at a new side-street location. A state-of-the-art, 30,500-square-foot Club Città opened in December 2001, after a nearly two-year absence from the nightlife scene.

The second phase was the opening last November of the main part of the village, a two-level, 3,700-square-foot annex housing a beauty salon, and the new Cinecittà. The third phase, which will connect by pedestrian bridge to the main section, is due to open in September. A banquet hall and bell-towered wedding chapel (the base of operations for Città Wedding, a new venture) will crown the seven-level, 60,000-square-foot complex of restaurants, shops, offices and exhibit space. The path weaving through the project will terminate at the chapel.

(One last site is slated for future redevelopment. A multilevel edifice housing Misu and other offices, and which may include a health club and apartments or a hotel, will eventually replace a freestanding, 1,000-seat cinema.)

In addition to the winding promenade, La Cittadella evokes its Italian influences through landscaped terraces, bridges, stepped gardens and outdoor seating that spills from the cafés and restaurants into the street. The buildings are painted in soft greens, burnt oranges and golden yellows, with a technique that suggests they have aged over time.

But though many recent developments in Japan have been designed around specific themes (SCT, October 2001), La Cittadella is less a Disneyesque replication of such hill towns as Positano or Capri than a distillation of the way people circulate through and use them.

“The architecture itself isn’t so reminiscent of Italy,” Benedetti said. “It’s sort of an abstraction, without time or place.” La Cittadella also has high-tech features, including background music and animated light and water shows, that would surely raise eyebrows in the typical hill town’s piazza.

La Cittadella’s unusual design is coupled with an equally unusual leasing strategy that emphasizes restaurants over retailing. The portion that has opened is 100 percent occupied, according to Benedetti, and it is dominated by 17 eateries. Scattered among the restaurants are a florist, an optician and a handful of shops specializing in watches, jewelry, makeup and body care, lingerie, pet goods, gifts and housewares. Large sites are devoted to such entertainment and hobbyist uses as Tower Records, a store for guitar aficionados, and a games and amusement arcade. The breakdown by square footage here is 31,000 square feet of restaurants and 22,000 square feet of retail space.

This preponderance of food is as atypical in Japan as it would be in the United States, said Dawn A. Clark, a principal at Callison Architects, Seattle, who works extensively on Asian retail projects.

“Restaurants and food have always been a much bigger part of shopping centers and stores in Japan than in the U.S.,” she said. “They eat out more often than we do, they have smaller homes, so they don’t entertain in the home as much as we do, and the lifestyle is geared to grabbing prepared food quickly. But having more food than retail is unusual.”

Though it’s too soon to judge the leasing strategy’s success, some observers suggest that it might help distinguish La Cittadella in a weak, saturated retail market.

“Rather than dilute the property’s image by inserting typical retail tenants and compete with ordinary shopping centers, the owner wisely decided to expand on its existing strengths — a cineplex, live music club and amusements — and improve the environment with a better design and tenant mix,” said Seth Sulkin, president and CEO of Pacifica Corp., a Tokyo-based retail developer. “With Japanese consumption falling, restaurants and services have been slightly outperforming retail, so I think it is a timely idea.” Even so, he said, “the number of restaurants feels too many.”

The gloomy economy may not have shed light on many other options, however. Twelve years of stagnation have brought Japan record-high unemployment, declining household income and record-low interest rates that are shriveling the prospects for savings. Uncertain about the future, the Japanese have firmly tightened their belts: Between 1995 and 2001 (the last year for which information from the government’s Statistics Bureau was available in English), expenditures on clothing and footwear plunged 25 percent. By contrast, eating out dropped only about 6 percent, in keeping with the overall decline in consumption, while spending on reading and recreation (a single category) actually rose.

Misu is banking on dining and entertainment to draw visitors to La Cittadella, but Japan’s stagnation has not deterred retail-focused development elsewhere. Shopping center openings continue to rise, from 39 in 2001 to 50 in 2002, and more than 60 are expected in 2003, according to the Japan Council of Shopping Centers, Tokyo.

But neither the increasing competition for disposable income nor the grim economic climate has dampened local expectations for La Cittadella. Kawasaki, which has attempted since 1980 to improve its gray, industrial image with a series of urban design and renewal projects, looked to the project to spur “the development of a new and energetic Kawasaki enveloping the city’s youth culture,” according to the city’s Web site.

Since its November opening, La Cittadella has indeed been drawing a young, affluent, trendy and educated crowd, Benedetti says. “We hope this acts as a catalyst,” he said. “Kawasaki is trying to find itself as a city, and this project was meant to inject some vigor, color and life.”

That’s just what Horton Plaza did for a down-at-the-heels San Diego. Almost 20 years later and some 5,600 miles across the Pacific, Benedetti says he believes that La Cittadella can echo Horton Plaza’s lasting accomplishment. “The anchors — the cineplex, the club — are established venues we’ve just made that much better,” he said. “That will give this a long, successful duration.”

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