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Building History

Shopping mall builder Ernest W. Hahn (1919–1992), of Ernest W. Hahn, Incorporated, was involved in the design of this center-city mall in San Diego. John Jerde served as the architect for Horton Plaza. It embodied "experience architecture," a concept developed by Jerde, to encourage shoppers to patronize malls that had strong architectural character. Since the 1960s, mall developers chose to make their complexes as predictable, comfortable and safe as possible; this formula had grown stale by the 1980s, however, and Hahn's firm was looking for something distinctive for this important, Downtown San Diego site.

Building Notes

In 2008, Horton Plaza contained over 130 shops and cafes, with Nordstrom and Macy's Department Stores as anchor tenants. Tel: 619-238-1596 (2008). The English architectural historian and theorist, Charles Jencks once called Horton Plaza a "Caesar's Salad of cliches."

Horton Plaza was also the name of a small park located nearby that became a designated San Diego City Landmark on 03/19/1971.

Karrie Jacobs, in her Architect Magazine.com obituary of Jerde, noted that Horton Plaza was the architect's first big success: "Place making, à la Jerde, was really a product of the 1960s, an antidote to the soulless environments generated by urban renewal. The discipline’s early champions, like Jane Jacobs and William Whyte, were specifically concerned with public places. Jerde’s approach to place making, by contrast, was about fashioning private space that mimicked public space. His goal was to lure ordinary Americans out of their suburban backyards and into something akin to communal experience. He believed there was one way to do it: 'The only possible public experience that you could have at all, ever, was in shopping,' he said in a 2001 interview with the University of Southern California’s news website. 'Consumption is the addiction of the American.' Indeed, his breakout project, Horton Plaza, which opened in 1985, turned a section of downtown San Diego into a colorful open-air shopping mall, a sugarcoated version of an urban business district. It was wildly successful, attracting 25 million visitors in its first year." (See Karrie Jacobs, Architect Magazine.com, "Remembering Jon Jerde," published 03/19/2015. accessed 10/23/2024.)

PCAD id: 11036