San Diego's Iconic Horton Plaza to be Reborn as Tech Hub
- Mathew Hose
- May 10, 2020
- 5 min read
When it opened in 1985, development of the Horton Plaza shopping mall in San Diego was hailed as a blueprint for how retail can revitalize a downtown area.
The mall in its heyday attracted millions of shoppers to the city’s core with its unorthodox, multicolored and multi-patterned postmodern architecture. The American Institute of Architects described architect Jon Jerde’s design as a “razzle-dazzle and unvarnished mix of architectural forms” that “raises basic cornball stuff momentarily to an effective level of ephemeral design.”
It effectively turned San Diego’s downtown from a seedy area “that nobody wanted to come to” into a bona fide destination, according to San Diego City Councilmember Chris Ward.
Now, the city and owner Stockdale Capital Partners are seeking a new version of “razzle-dazzle” in the form of the technology industry. Amid shifting shopping habits and changing opinions of what makes an urban core appealing, a developer is looking to significantly change the six-block concrete fortress by converting it into a mixed-use technology campus and opening it up to the neighborhood. The building’s zebra stripes and pink- and coral-colored arcades will give way to something a bit more sleek and corporate.
“Horton Plaza used to be something special,” said Daniel Michaels, managing director at Stockdale, at a May 2019 meeting of the San Diego City Council. “Everyone knows that. I grew up going there as a kid. We want to make it special again and make it economically impactful to the community, and we think this does just that.” The jobs component is an important one for the project, as officials have bemoaned the fact that the city loses much of its young talent pool coming out of San Diego’s universities to tech-heavy cities like San Francisco and Seattle.
