Vallco does not deserve its status as the poor cousin of Silicon Valley shopping malls.
While Westfield Valley Fair has grown fat and a bit overconfident as the largest local mall, and Stanford Shopping Center is the local sophisticate, Cupertino’s Vallco Fashion Park has suffered an identity crisis almost since opening in 1976. Despite having Sears, Penney’s and Macy’s as anchors, many of its stores in recent years have frankly been on par with those in out-of-the-way strip malls: seamstresses, T-shirt stores, comic book collectibles. With the opening of a new AMC cineplex April 27, Vallco – now calling itself Cupertino Square – is making a bid for a new upscale life.
Bold ’70s design
But if Cupertino expects the new Vallco to become a lively urban district with bustling sidewalks, it’s going to be disappointed. The alterations try to follow recent urban design trends, but in the wrong place and the wrong way.
The fact is that Vallco was one of the most innovative mall designs in the state. It was landscaped adventurously and swathed in a stand of gorgeous trees – the only local mall sitting in a park, not an asphalt tundra. Earth was bulldozed and sculpted against its walls to disguise its bulk, the better to blend with its residential neighborhood. Beautiful wood trellises, laced with wisteria, stretched out into its parking lots. Ironically this effort has not helped to win the support of many of the mall’s neighbors; a high wall (planted with beautiful redwood trees) entirely cuts off the neighboring subdivision. Unlike Santana Row, the surrounding homes are not tied into the parks and conveniences of the mall site.
Even more creative is Vallco’s bridge – a Silicon Valley Ponte Vecchio – over Wolfe Road, linking the mall’s east and west wings. It’s not just a pedestrian walkway. It’s lined with shops (like the original Ponte Vecchio in Florence, Italy), with generous bay windows that put the mall on display to passersby as they drive beneath.
Where other malls are like fortresses with parking lots like moats, Vallco’s bridge created a gateway, an entry point, a part of the mall that literally opened the mall to the city around it. This solution integrates Vallco into the city. No other mall did anything as creative architecturally until Santana Row came along.
Vallco, like Eastridge, created a new aesthetic for the mall. Instead of the long straight walkways and cubic shapes of the first generation of malls in the 1950s, these 1970s malls introduced skewed corridors so walking didn’t seem so endless. Ceilings, railings and soffits weren’t flat, but carved like the facets of a crystal. Skylights overhead created entire landscapes of their own, adding to the visual energy of the space.
The atrium court in front of Macy’s still demonstrates this. So does the main facade of Macy’s, a great flying wedge that boldly juts out over the two-level entry. Accented with a rich board-form concrete texture on the walls and railings, embraced by careful landscaping and landscape berms, it is an excellent piece of 1970s design.
The new additions, however, ignore these existing strengths. That’s summed up pointedly in the concrete bridge leading to Macy’s from the new parking structure. It jams itself into the second-floor balcony, compromising and weakening the original design, and turning its back on the original decorative motifs.
In Vallco we have an original piece of commercial architecture that stretched itself creatively in order to make better architecture for suburbia.
So how do the latest additions to Vallco/Cupertino Square measure up?
Here are the changes: The facade on the west side of Wolfe Road has been pushed out and altered with a new two-level entry, parking below and a large AMC pylon sign. The mall’s ground floor will have more new retail space, still under construction. The ice rink on the east side of Wolfe will remain, and a new bowling alley will open next to it this July.
A food court is being added near Penney’s. Two new parking structures have been added at Macy’s and Penney’s. And at the heart of the old building, a new sky-lighted atrium has been added for the cineplex’s ticket lobby. A new third level contains the theaters themselves.
Can it work? Speaking commercially, yes: The cineplex could help to attract some of the bigger chain restaurants and stores that are needed for long-term success. But speaking in urban and architectural terms, the mall, the city and the architects (Perkowitz and Ruth of Long Beach) did not bring the same creativity to the alterations as the original architects did.
Current trends in suburban planning chant the mantra of “street life.” That means placing stores and display windows along the street (or at least the parking lot.) It means creating sidewalk cafes with tables and umbrellas. We see this trend in recent renovations at Eastridge, Valley Fair and Oakridge. At its very best at Santana Row, this concept is entirely integrated into the overall design.
An empty gesture
Following this trend, Vallco/Cupertino Square’s new facade has sweeping staircases right on the sidewalk, leading up and down to new entries. Big new windows for retail space (still under construction) also look out onto Wolfe Road. New stores along the east side of Wolfe in the ground floor of the new parking structure will add even more street-side shops.
But will enough people use these sidewalks and stores? Not likely. Santana Row works because its design funnels people from the parking structures, hotel and upstairs housing onto the sidewalk, creating the critical density of people to support restaurants and shops.
Vallco’s design doesn’t permit that. The parking areas funnel people directly into the mall, not onto the sidewalks. The sidewalks along Wolfe are a side-thought. And where the streets along Santana Row are narrow with slow traffic and many crosswalks, Wolfe Road is a multi-lane street with higher speeds, discouraging leisurely strolls. Unless the city approves a radical redesign of this street, these sidewalk stores and sidewalk entries are not going to create the kind of street life that cities crave. It’s an empty gesture.
There are ways to turn Vallco into a strong suburban center that attracts people and creates a strong identity for Cupertino. But no one has made a serious try yet.
Contact Alan Hess at alhess@aol.com.
