Richard Nilsen
The Arizona Republic
Sept. 4, 2007 01:55 PM
NORTHEAST VALLEY – If you wander the back streets of any ancient Middle-Eastern city, you will come across the bazaar, a marketplace stretched along an alley with stalls stretched from end to end. It’s the archetypal market and has been the prototype for all of them since, from the Athenian agora to the rue Mouffetard in Paris to the great antediluvian malls of Paramus, N.J.
Such markets can be humble – tents lined up in Istanbul – or they can be high-dollar and upmarket, like Kierland Commons in northeast Phoenix, at Greenway Parkway and Scottsdale Road.
But no matter which, you have store next to store, and a passageway for shoppers to walk along. It is a universal pattern and architecturally speaking, it’s hard to bring anything new to the idea.Perhaps that is why the claim that Kierland Commons is a “new kind of shopping experience” doesn’t quite ring with the excitement it might.
It’s not so new, after all.
Restoration of a proven lifestyle Even the innovation of offering pricey condos above street level is not so new: A cheap Gristede’s in Manhattan has apartments above it, too. With 75 stores arranged like a small town on 38 acres, Kierland Commons is a pleasant place to spend a few hours. Its designers – Nelsen Partners of Scottsdale along with the Scottsdale civil engineering firm Primas and Associates and the Phoenix office of landscape architects Design Workshop – have made it almost a theme park: Its central passage is called Main Street – not unlike the one in Disneyland.
It’s hard not to be ambivalent about Kierland Commons. It has to be admitted that visiting is pleasant: There are shaded sidewalks, frequent park benches where you can sit and read a newspaper, lots of misters to help you keep cool, green landscaping, piped-in music and a central park with spritzing fountains where mothers bring their children to play.
And the atmosphere for shopping is also nice: clean stores with a wide variety of upscale merchandise, and lots of eateries, from the small lunch place to the high-end restaurant.
The look of the place is interesting enough visually – with well-considered details: triangular sconces along the store exteriors, curvy door handles for the store entrances, planters with herbs and flowers.
Look is damned with faint praise Yet, even if Kierland Commons is decidedly “pleasant” and “nice,” those very words are damning in their beige faintness. If you look at it one way, we should be grateful for a shopping mall to be pleasant at all; the norm is a numbing, white-noise acoustic, crowd jostled aggravation and Kierland Commons is not.
But looked at another way, if it has pretensions to architectural distinction, it might need to have some architecture. And Kierland Commons has almost none.
Yes, it has an aesthetic surface of interesting detail and ornament, pleasant color and the occasional angle, but inside, the stores are still boxes: still the stoa with its stalls.
The detail is applied like cake frosting to a plain yellow cake: stucco over plywood and girders.
Where are the interesting spaces? The interiors that make for an emotional experience? The new way of surprising you as you move from one room to another?
Well, they aren’t there. Most visitors will not miss them and will instead enjoy the atmosphere, which, as we have said, is very, very pleasant.
Distinguished marketing instead But we should not be tricked into thinking this is what makes distinguished architecture. Instead, it is distinguished marketing. The Commons is also the core of a larger, 730-acre master-planned community that includes several financial institutions, office buildings, the Kierland Design Center, with 450,000 square feet of home furnishings outlets and the Westin Kierland Resort and Spa and a golf course that doubles as a bird sanctuary. New construction is everywhere.
What used to be a quiet corner of Sonoran Desert halfway between Scottsdale and Carefree is now backfilled with development, and it is a matter of personal taste whether this can be counted an improvement.
