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Horton Plaza doesn't quite exist

By Tony Phillips

July 3, 2006

San Diego--It has been more than 20 years since Horton Plaza opened. The mall was constructed for the then unheard of sum of $140 million. It is the earliest example of architect John Jerde’s so-called “experience architecture.” It’s an experience all right – an experience in futility.

I have been to Horton Plaza four times in the past year and I have not yet managed to get where I wanted to go. Not once. Not ever. It doesn’t matter if I’m parked on the artichoke level and want to go to Nordstrom or if I just walk in from Broadway to get a glass of wine at the Samba Grill. No matter where one finds oneself in Horton Plaza, and no matter where one wishes to go, there is absolutely no way to get whence thither. The entire place is one big optical illusion.

I am planning to write an article for the International Journal of Theoretical Physics in which I will put forth the Horton Hypothesis, which claims that Horton Plaza gives the impression of existing in three dimensions but actually exists only in one, namely time. Its apparent existence in three-dimensional space is a chimerical by-product of its temporal creation. From the moment it was dreamt up and $140 million got spent on it, it had to present at least a phenomenal likeness of being, but it isn’t even real. Our collective belief in its reality is all that sustains it.

Think on that for a second. If we could all stop believing in the maze of intersecting, overlapping dead-ends and loops that constitute the place, Horton Plaza would vanish before our eyes. But of course we can’t stop believing in it because our brains are designed in such a way that seemingly present shopping monsters can’t be unseen. That’s how optical illusions work. They play on your brain’s own hard-wired weaknesses. Jerde knew this. He craftily designed an impossibility that exploits the brain’s tendency to infer spatial existence even when there is none and that’s how he pulled off the greatest hoax in the history of urban planning.

The practical implications of the Horton Hypothesis are significant. Our city currently finds itself mired in a $1.4 billion pension deficit. Since Mike Aguirre isn’t afraid to sue anyone he wants, why shouldn’t he sue the current owners of Horton Plaza, The Westfield Group? They know what they’re doing. They’re pulling off a charade on a massive scale – six-and-one-half city blocks to be precise. They’re using up hundreds of millions of dollars a year in prime real estate that is actually full of nothing but dead air. They owe us, and they owe us a bunch. They owe us $1.4 billion, to be precise.

And before you say, “Tony, that’s absurd,” ask yourself just how absurd it really is. It isn’t nearly as absurd as paying Kroll $20.3 million (80 times more than its original contract) to deliver a report that is now six months late and still hasn’t been seen even in draft form but will, presumably, tell the City that the sky is not falling. It’s nowhere near as absurd as funding the Mayor’s Ethics Commission to the tune of $1.2 million this year so that City staff can be taught not to steal. In the scheme of San Diego governance, suing Westfield for trickery is a rather logical thing to do.

However, since Aguirre’s got his plate fairly full at the moment, he would probably have to farm out the suit to a consulting law firm. I think he should bring in Jerry Coughlan, the slimeball who got Michael Zucchet’s guilty verdict set aside. That dude is good. He made the Zukester’s felonious larceny disappear. Maybe he can pull off the same magic on Horton Plaza. It’s worth a shot.

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