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TOWN CENTER LOOK LOVED BY SOME, SCORNED BY OTHERS

By Susan Thorne

The shopping center industry, which is often blamed for the decline of the traditional American town, is also getting some flack for reviving it.

The New Urbanism-inspired town center layout, with its grid of streets around an open space, low-rise buildings and street-level specialty retail shops, aspires to the neighborly ambience and human scale of an earlier time. It offers a shopping environment that is familiar, nostalgic and suggestive of community. Often town centers are designed around a retro look, with such features as clock towers, antique lamps and brick pathways.

But though all this involves a higher standard of exterior and public-area design and materials than the plain-vanilla box mall, the borrowed format of these centers contributes nothing new in design terms. Rather, it merely recycles the forms and architecture of the past, critics say. Are soothing, Norman Rockwell-style streetscapes and ersatz villages really the best representatives of our time, they ask?

“When you build a fake New England village, there’s no cultural content,” said Benjamin Wood, a principal at Wood & Zapata architects, Boston. “All you’re doing is imitating Disneyland and insulting people’s intelligence.”

Town centers may be proving successful, Wood says, but not for the reasons some might think. “People think the success of all these New England villages is tied to their nostalgic appeal,” he said. “But it’s not because of the architecture; it’s because people are tired of being deprived of fresh air and sunshine. You have the sensation of giving up your freedom and entering private property when you walk into a shopping center. But walking into a town center, people have the idea that the streets are public.”

Even some New Urbanists are down on these centers, which Steven Bodzin, communications director at the Congress for New Urbanism, a San Francisco-based nonprofit educational and advocacy organization, said are inferior imitations of genuine small-town life. New Urbanism, which took hold in the late 1980s as a reaction to sprawl, advocates regional planning to balance jobs and housing, and promotes the development of neighborhoods that are easy to walk in and served by local retail.

“Real Main Streets have excitement from many different kinds of people and buildings all fitting together,” he said. “There might be a church, shops, a town hall, some offices, transportation and gathering places, and you can see different things happening at 6 a.m. or 8 p.m.”

Most of the new town centers lack a connection to a community.

“Their ‘streets’ aren’t made to be real streets with cars and bikes coming and going,” Bodzin said. “These ersatz Main Streets miss out on all that integrated activity, while providing a kind of diluted version of it to increase sales.”

Town center architecture has plenty of defenders, however.

“In defense of developers, they have to build from scratch a venue that will draw people and be appealing,” said Bruce G. Jolley, vice president and director of planning for the Jerde Partnership, Venice, Calif. “Like it or not, it is often historical styles that can do that.” Jolley noted that truly modern, cutting-edge looks are a minority taste, as can be seen from housing architecture. “That’s why you don’t find more people living in avant-garde houses.”

The “faux village” reaction, at least on the part of shoppers, generally happens when a center is poorly executed, with insufficient attention to materials and design, said Shari Walker, president of Washington, D.C.-based Madison Marquette’s Western division. Walker’s division manages Town Center Corte Madera (Calif.) and other town centers.

Experts say the architectural theming of town centers needs to be handled carefully to avoid the impression of a clichéd or artificial formula.

“If it’s done well, it’s accepted,” she said. “Good taste is always in style.”

Sensitivity to regional building styles, history and culture are important in giving a shopping center authenticity in the shopper’s eyes, said Stan Laegried, principal partner at Callison Architecture, Seattle. Architects, he said, are increasingly turning to American design motifs following the recent vogue for Mediterranean villages and other exotic prototypes. “I think designers are realizing how difficult it is to pull off these imported idioms and that they can seem out of place.”

Callison, Laegried said, prefers to make a project fit with its environment. “We try to craft an architectural style that is evocative of the immediate area,” he said. In addition to structural details, Callison studies the characteristic color palate of local buildings and even the lighting. La Encantada, for instance, a town center that Westcor Partners is developing in Tucson, Ariz., is modeled on the Southwest vernacular of arcades, intimate courtyards and unadorned building surfaces. An addition to Manhattan Village, Manhattan Beach, Calif., will feature walkways, arches and landscaping based on Los Angeles-area beach communities, including paint hues that match those of local buildings. (Callison is architect for both projects.)

Paradoxically, one of the best ways to execute a design theme is to introduce variety rather than keeping everything alike, said Paris Rutherford, vice president of RTKL Associates. The Dallas-based architectural and planning firm has created several town centers, including Bowie (Md.) Town Center, and Washingtonian Center, Gaithersburg, Md. Including such nonretail uses as residential or office space can help achieve this, he noted.

“Ideally, you’ve got a blend of uses so you have different activities on the street, and the architecture becomes more diverse,” Rutherford said. “This textural variety feels more authentic.”

People accept a mall’s look as genuine when they have become personally involved with it, and mixed uses contribute to that sense of reality, agreed Mark Nickita, president of Detroit-based architectural and urban design firm Archive Design Studio. “The idea that you could live above the bookstore or the restaurant, shop and eat in the center — that gives a sense of real ownership. It’s more real than a regional center that locks its doors at 9 p.m.,” Nickita said.

That sense of ownership has occurred at the centers built by Santa Monica-based Caruso Holdings, its executives say.

“Our centers have become community centers,” said David Williams, senior vice president of architecture at Caruso. “They’ve become part of people’s lives.” The outdoor public spaces around the man-made lakes at two Caruso town centers — The Grove and The Commons at Calabasas — contain plants that change seasonally and are even home to families of ducks, he said.

Easton Town Center, Columbus, Ohio, has earned acclaim for breaking away from the enclosed mall mold. But such developments don’t break any architectural ground, critics say.

But however well executed and accepted they may be, the retro-look architecture of many town centers is still a borrowed style, inspired by an earlier age and its values, not the values of today. Even architects and developers who have built retro shopping centers acknowledge that matters can be taken too far.

“We’re approaching the threshold of too much of a good thing,” said Callison’s Laegried. “The cynic would say we’re getting a lot of these centers, that it’s getting too cute.”

But retail centers are not an ideal venue for cutting-edge architecture, said Yaromir Steiner, president of Steiner + Associates, Columbus, Ohio, which developed that city’s Easton Town Center, a mixed-use project that replicates the style of a traditional American town.

“We’re not trying to be in your face, like Frank Gehry at Bilbao,” he said, referring to the ultramodern branch of the Guggenheim in Spain. “The architecture in a shopping center is really just a backdrop. It has to have traditional styles and proportions that people are comfortable with.”

Traditional building styles are both easier to execute and cheaper than modern ones, he said. “Architects and designers know how to design traditional structures, and every contractor has been doing them for years. But when you try to do modern, you have to invent your own vocabulary.” This requires new types of materials, talented architects and builders, and more time, he said.

Nonetheless, town centers do offer contemporary statements, said Henry Beer, co-chairman of CommArts, an interdisciplinary design company in Boulder, Colo. CommArts is currently at work on Taubman Centers’ Stony Point, Richmond, Va. Beer points out that a shopping center’s retailers reflect today’s virtues and values, while the developer can furnish the “picture frame” — the store’s exterior — in a more traditional style. This contrast of vintage and modern generates excitement. “If everything is in the same style — old or new — it can become homogeneous and dull,” he said. “Great design balances the two.”

Jerde’s Jolley also recommends mixing old and new elements to create updated versions of design styles. Jerde is using a modernized version of Moderne, for example, (a 1920s architectural idiom) in the CityPlace project, Long Beach, Calif. “I think you’ll see more and more of such hybrids,” he predicted. The same effect could be achieved by retaining different designers for different aspects of the project, he suggested. “You want to give projects a feeling of being new, of being about the time we live in now,” he explained.

Caruso has mixed Americana architecture (art deco, classic, Mission and Italianate) for an early-20th-century feel at The Grove, the company’s 600,000-square-foot landmark project next to Los Angeles’ Farmers Market. It creates the impression that the center has evolved over time, said Caruso’s Williams.

However, none of this is likely to impress Wood, the Boston architect. He compares retro-style shopping centers to the kitschy popular art of Thomas Kinkade. “Why would you buy a piece of fake art? If you can’t afford real art, don’t buy art,” he advised. As for nostalgia, he says, “there are people out there who feel more comfortable preserving the past because there’s no danger in reliving past times. I think they’re burying their heads in the sand.”

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