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At a restaurant in the Shanghai Four Seasons, the architect meets Angela Nibbs, his company publicist, and Curtis Scharfenaker, his man in China. Jerde asks Scharfenaker to talk about the ordeal of designing privately funded malls for a nation still largely organized along totalitarian lines. China's development, Scharfenaker says, is dominated by enormous state-run operations called design institutes, which have only recently begun to break off into smaller, more dynamic firms. "They're not like design studios," he explains. "The design institutes are a complete delivery system where you have engineers, construction and architects. You've got well-trained architects in these huge bureaucracies."
In Japan or Europe, Jerde can rely on his prestige and past triumphs to exert some control over a new project's fate. Not here. "Remember," he says, "China has had 50 years of communist rule. They're not used to this sort of thing at all. The idea of artistic authorship is irrelevant to them." Often, the design institute and the foreign firm that must team up together discover they are working at cross-purposes. "As you come in and show them all that you want to do," Scharfenaker observes, "they'll say, 'Well, you can't do this, and you can't do that.' Or even worse, they won't say anything until you've gone way down the road. They'll let it take its own course and then finally the planning department will say, 'You can't do it,' and they'll say, 'We knew it all along.'"
"Our designs are given to them," Jerde says, "and something happens where they disappear behind the wall, and then we go to the opening and it's kind of—whoa! Very often, it's serendipitous, good changes they've made. But sometimes you get skavoogled, you know ..."
"Skavoogled," Scharfenaker says, laughing, "is a technical term."
"... where they interpret inaccurately what you're intending or they interpret things in their own terms."
Jerde's very first mainland commission—the Tianhe Plaza in Guangzhou—is a case study in skavoogling. The Jerde Partnership won the commission in the winter of 1993 from a Thai-Chinese developer who had begun his career in chicken sales and gone on to build a conglomerate dealing in motorcycles, trucks and property. For Tianhe Plaza, Jerde took his inspiration from a view of the Chinese landscape through an airplane window. "At the time, there was practically nothing over three stories in the country," he says. "I thought then that we should design the mall like a wafer cake. We'd build a garden, build two stories over that, and then another garden. And then two stories above that."
Although Jerde's atrium-style design was common enough outside of China, it was forbidden under Guangzhou's building code. "We brought over the chief engineers of the Guangzhou fire department to America," Scharfenaker remembers. "We sponsored a tour and took them to several states, and set up meetings where fire marshals could educate them on how it is possible to do these wide open spaces safely."
"We never imagined having to include that expense in our architectural fee," Jerde says, laughing.
To outrace a new subway line about to plow through the Tianhe site, the developer moved fast to excavate an enormous hole in the ground and install the mall's footings. Then the Thai baht collapsed, construction screeched to a stop and Jerde's firm was removed from the project. "Subsequently, there was a recovery," Scharfenaker says, "and two or three different companies came in." For years, the mall lingered as a man-made crater. More than a decade after it was launched, it is just now nearing completion.
Likewise, Jerde met with frustration when he designed Shanghai's JoinBuy No. 9 department store. Originally, he sighs, "I wanted to have a whole pedestrian ramping progression inside there, to make it to the cinemas at the top." He describes a series of switchbacks with his hands. "But it became just a straight shot up, because the client needed to cover the maximum amount of store frontage as possible. So you lose something in view of the experiential world, but from the point of view of user needs, you have to do it."
And then there was the biggest disappointment of all: Shanghai's Super Brand Mall, prominently located in the Pudong district across the Huangpu River. Originally intended to host the terminal for the new Shanghai ferry, the Super Brand mall was to intercept privileged commuters with an eye for designer jeans and bejeweled watches. Jerde would welcome everyone, whatever their means, into a lushly landscaped park. His pedestrian highway would lead them gradually toward his mall, and the city's next millennium.
But Jerde's intentions were thwarted once more. The Asian economic collapse and the maneuverings of local bureaucrats played a decisive role, pulling the project out from under him. In his absence, the park and his pedestrian highway were both scrapped. "They basically took everything that was good about the project out," Jerde says. "Then they realized they had an oinker on their hands, so they brought us back in to try to fix it all. We got as much fixed as we could, but that was it." In a coup de grce, the Shanghai municipal government moved the ferry terminal onto another developer's property, starving the mall of its commuter traffic.
The Pudong that Jerde sees across the water now is overrun by enormous hotels and office towers; his mall, immense, yet dim, half-vacant and deprived of its high concepts, is a part of the larger confusion. The architect tries to see humor in the worst excesses of runaway Shanghai development—its puffed-up swagger and ur-male buffoonery. "These tall buildings are really erections. They're just a signal, a big penile signal," he says. Jerde notices his publicist looking perturbed and corrects himself. "Don't say 'penile,'" he jokes, "Say, 'finger.'"