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Jon Jerde, an architect whose designs seized on the human yen to shop,merging the mall and downtown, commercial and public space, and fauxenvironments and real experiences, died on Feb. 9 at his home in Los Angeles.He was 75.

His wife, Janice Ambry Jerde, said the precise cause had not yet beendetermined. She said he had been treated for a number of ailments, includingbladder cancer and Alzheimers disease.

An established master of the modern shopping mall and all its clones andoffspring, as the architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable wrote of him in 1997,Mr. Jerde (pronounced JER-dee) spoke about himself as a place maker or acreator of experiences rather than as a builder of buildings.

His work, much of it alive with color and dazzle, was often perceived as anantidote to the bland malls of convenience that proliferated in the 1960s and1970s outside American cities and helped drain the life from many of them.

In trying to reinvent the town square, Mr. Jerde was something of acontroversial figure; he was lauded for his contemporary spin on the pre-suburban downtown and for creating urban (or urbanlike) destinations thatdrew diverse crowds for sightseeing, people-watching and money-spending. Buthe was also criticized for replacing authentic places with ersatz versions of them,and for designing theme parks for the acquisitive.

His designs, which have been realized around the world, include themassive Mall of America in Bloomington, Minn.; Horton Plaza, a five-storyoutdoor mall that helped revitalize downtown San Diego; and the FremontStreet Experience, a reimagining of the historic district of downtown Las Vegas.He also designed the Bellagio, one of the Las Vegas Strips most opulent hotels,whose proprietor, Steve Wynn, called Mr. Jerde the Bernini of our time.

Among Mr. Jerdes other projects were Canal City Hakata, an office,entertainment and retail complex in Fukuoka, Japan, knitted together bywaterways and adorned by fountains; and the Universal CityWalk, a pedestrian-

only complex adjoining Universal Studios in Los Angeles, which The New YorkTimes critic Herbert Muschamp described as a zippy collage of signs andstorefronts that is more likely to be nominated for an Oscar than for aPritzker.

The movie analogy was an apt one both for Mr. Jerdes intentions and forhis method. Putting together multilevel structures with vivid outdoor spaces,inviting walking paths and gathering spots, bright signs, and lighting both toamuse and to attract attention, he thought of his creations as settings for eventsto unfold not for people to inhabit or work in but to visit and enjoy.

We put people in a popular and collective environment in which they canbe most truly and happily alive, he said of his company, the Jerde Partnership,which he founded in 1977. Based in Venice, Calif., it now has offices in Seoul,Hong Kong and Shanghai.

Before he sat down to design a new project, Mr. Jerde often wrote about theexperience he envisioned people having in the finished environment, and like amoviemaker he made storyboards sketching out a visitors narrative. His wife,who is also an architect, said in an interview, Hed write a script for what hewanted you to feel.

Jon Adams Jerde was born in Alton, Ill., on Jan. 22, 1940. His father, Paul,was a peripatetic engineer for oil companies, and before he and his wife, theformer Marion Adams, split up, he kept the family moving, mostly in the West,as he traveled from oil field to oil field.

Jon eventually settled with his mother in the Long Beach, Calif., area. Mr.Jerde told The Los Angeles Times that he was a lonely child who built models ofcommunities in his backyard from neighborhood junk.

For a time he studied engineering at the University of California, LosAngeles, but his first love was sketching and drawing, and after a chancemeeting with a dean at the University of Southern California, who encouragedhim, he switched schools and curriculums, graduating from U.S.C.s school ofarchitecture (where there is now an endowed chair in his name) in 1965.

A trip to Europe in the early 1960s left him impressed with the vibrancy ofthe Old World public squares he saw and an itch to recreate that at home. Heworked for a Los Angeles firm that designed conventional shopping centers, andin 1977 he went out on his own, accepting a commission to design a mall for aSan Diego downtown that had been more or less abandoned by San Diegans, itspornography shops and tattoo parlors catering to sailors from the ships mooredin the nearby harbor. The mall, Horton Plaza, opened eight years later.

After its debut in August 1985, the colorful, trendsetting retail-entertainment complex did the lions share of reviving downtown San Diego,The San Diego Union-Tribune (now U-T San Diego) wrote in 2005 on theoccasion of the projects 20th anniversary. A destination for urban shoppers,diners and moviegoers, the outdoor mall is teeming with distinctivearchitectural personality, a playful pastiche of faux architectural elements, tiledwalls and fountains, and quirky connections via bridges, stairs and ramps.

A concurrent project for Mr. Jerde was the 1984 Summer Olympic Games,held in Los Angeles. With a graphic designer, Deborah Sussman, Mr. Jerdecreated a series of colorful banners, gateways, tents and other elements tovisually link more than 100 locations across a wide swath of the Los Angelesarea. An invasion of butterflies was Mr. Jerdes description of the approach.

Mr. Jerde was married four times and divorced thrice. In addition to Ms.Jerde, whom he married in 1990, he is survived by three daughters, JenniferJerde Castor, Maggie Jerde Joyce and Kate Jerde Cole; two sons, Christopherand Oliver; and four grandchildren.

In an interview with The Sacramento Bee in 2002, Mr. Jerde said that hisinterest in communal space had its roots in a reaction to his childhood isolation.

I really love crowds, he said. And by that measure at least, he achieved hisvision.

CityWalk is a shopping mall that refuses to be a shopping mall, wherewere desperate consumers of one anothers company, the writer Ed Leibowitzdeclared in Los Angeles magazine in 2002. It offers an 18-screen multiplex, ablues bar, a bowling alley, 28 restaurants and several dozen shops, but it givesaway the best of itself for free.

CityWalk is not L.A.s Piazza San Marco, its Champs-lyses, its 42ndStreet and Broadway, but it comes closer than anyplace else weve got. By 8 p.m.our own Broadway is a netherworld of shuttered storefronts. Hollywood andVine is a specter of the splendid crossroads that went wild on V-J Day. Only atCityWalk can we experience a New Years Eve countdown as frenzied andconvivial as Times Squares.A version of this article appears in print on February 19, 2015, on page A18 of the New York edition with theheadline: Jon Jerde, Architect of Merging Visions, Dies at 75.

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