The Great Mall of China

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Jerde's frame is short and stout, his ears are large, a fringe of gray blond hair plays above his liquid blue eyes. He looks and sounds more like a '50s jazz musician than chief executive of the Jerde Partnership, heading up a staff of 100, hired by some of the shrewdest businessmen around. He has made these people hundreds of millions—perhaps billions—of dollars since setting up his company in 1977. Yet there is no sense that he belongs to their world. He has always felt himself to be an outsider, a lonely and isolated misfit who is most comfortable hiding out in his antique-filled retreat deep in one of Los Angeles' most exquisite canyons, built of ancient timbers and river-smoothened boulders. A former alcoholic who says he was diagnosed as manic-depressive some years ago, Jerde hates to shop, shuns crowds and has no interest in buying the kind of mass-market merchandise that his malls sell. "I'm a recluse," he says. "I'll create these places that are enormously successful, but I wouldn't go to them."

Yet Jerde does not scorn the shopping mall. Although others in his field dismiss these temples of retail as a tawdry, low-class architectural pursuit, Jerde views them more idealistically as the modern equivalent of a town square or public park in which the community comes together. "All these ambitious designers were talking to the lite while the shopping-mall architects thought that all you had to do was exploit people," says Jerde. "I went into retail because that's where the people are. The opportunity is humongous to host the people honorably."

Jerde's architectural populism emerged well before any of his malls. At the University of Southern California School of Architecture, he won a traveling fellowship to Italy, where he was smitten by the villages of Tuscany, whose humble streets welcomed him "with the intimacy and warmth of a family." Returning to Los Angeles, he worked for 13 years as a design director for a major shopping-mall firm, initially as a way to keep up alimony payments following his first divorce. (After two more failed marriages, Jerde, who refers to himself as "Dr. Chaos," has found stability with his fourth wife, architect Janice Ambry Jerde.)

Jerde soon saw how he might commandeer this most-frowned-upon sector of the architectural profession and make malls that ennobled the masses. But his clients were more intent on exploiting than ennobling.

So he abandoned architecture, only to be lured back when a San Diego developer found himself saddled with Horton Plaza—an albatross of a project in the most forsaken slab of San Diego's blighted core. The developer's solution: lure Jerde out of retirement. "He said, 'Jon, you know that crap you used to talk about?'" Jerde recalls. "'It's time has come.'" Jerde cobbled together a grand promenade surrounded by Spanish mission, high Renaissance and ancient Roman architecture. Dozens of crazy ramps led apparently to nowhere; shops and restaurants were half-hidden in the pandemonium. To the retail industry, the $170 million Horton Plaza was the mall as severe midlife crisis, the ultimate expression of a loss of one's marbles. But it was an instant moneymaker, luring 25 million people in its first year and transforming the surrounding slum into a reclaimed downtown. Jerde's theories about the humanistic shopping mall needed never again to be taken on faith.

For a populist like Jerde, China offers the chance to appeal to the higher nature of the world's largest population. While its leaders revel in the nation's newfound status as manufacturer of half the world's consumer goods, Jerde is more interested in providing an uplifting environment in which regular Chinese, after decades of oppression, can commingle and—if they insist—shop. "China is a world of common people. There are the highly bred and highly educated, but it is really a country about common people," he declares. "It's 1.3 billion people who've been basically all under a tarp for 50 years at least. And they're just coming into the sunlight."