DESIGNS FOR SPENDING

And arrest it does. Amy Converse, manager of the Hi-Health store in the center, says she's seen an increase in business over the summer. "I get a lot of positive feedback, especially from out-of-town people who hadn't planned on stopping here. They just thought it looked so interesting they stopped in."

DeRoy-Mark confirms that this is exactly what he was trying to achieve. "Look, I don't say this is architecture that has to be taken seriously; it's not something somebody should do to his home. It's show biz, and that's what mercantilism is all about."

Well, not quite all. The problem with Papago Plaza is that it works a lot better for the passer-by at 40 miles an hour than for the on-foot browser. The transformation is literally only stucco deep. Behind the facade, it's still kind of an old dirt-bag shopping center.

The nine-foot-wide covered walkway that runs the full length of the center at least provides shade, and deRoy-Mark has tried to make it appear lively and cheerful by painting the rough-hewn log columns green, pink and blue. It remains a deadly space, however; you're essentially walking through a tunnel several hundred feet long.

Most of the storefronts still wear their old aluminum casement windows, and there isn't much variety or vitality in display design. The two pentagonal waterfall towers aren't attractive places for pedestrians to congregate; they're clearly designed to attract attention from 100 feet away.

What deRoy-Mark has done here is to sneak a gigantic billboard into the heart of the Valley municipality that's long been most vigilant on the issue of sign clutter. Papago Plaza isn't architecture at all; it's just a vast, two-dimensional outdoor advertisement for itself. It's goofy enough to amuse the snowbirds for one season, but it will not likely age well or continue to lure the customers in. Billboards, at least, periodically change.

"SHOPPERS ENTERING the Scottsdale Galleria for the first time may think they're in England, Paris or Beverly Hills." So opens the press kit for the new Galleria, which began a phased opening May 23. Unwittingly, the press release's author thus bored straight to the heart of the problem with this enormous mall: It could be anywhere--anyplace, at least, that has enough BMWs and Lexuses plying the streets to deliver the right class of customer. The architects of D.I. Design of Baltimore had very little to say about Scottsdale, Arizona or the Sonoran Desert.

This issue of regionalism has become a thorny and persistent problem in shopping center design. How to do it? Obviously, a Gucci-Pucci mall such as the Galleria can't employ low-rent facadism like Papago Plaza, and whatever regional character it has had better not be obvious or cornball. Faced with this dilemma, most mall architects simply reach for the glitter bag and lather the interiors with as much expensive material as possible.

First, the exterior. If nothing else, the Galleria certainly transforms the character of downtown Scottsdale. It looks serious, solid, permanent, even arrogant. It appears to weigh a billion tons. Its attitude is power and wealth. It, too, functions as a billboard, and its message is that downtown Scottsdale is no longer about rubber tomahawk shops. But all this gravity destroys the pedestrian scale of downtown Scottsdale. Walk along Stetson Drive, beside the mall's massive walls, and you feel as insignificant as a beetle circumnavigating the pyramids. Revealingly, the architects sprinkled benches along the sidewalks, but didn't even try to shade the pedestrian areas.

Driving to the Galleria? Well, if you're coming from ritzy north Scottsdale, fine: A convenient new duct in the middle of Scottsdale Road whisks you underground direct to the parking garage. If you're arriving from the middle-class south, there's no duct, no directions, no encouragement--better you should have stayed at Papago Plaza, chump.

Shoppers entering the Scottsdale Galleria for the first time may be forgiven for thinking, "Well, I've seen all this before." There are the obligatory glass elevators, glass-and-brass railings, a roof of pyramidal skylights, a trick fountain, a formal palm court and enough hanging philodendrons to qualify it as a biosphere of shopping. The floors are Italian marble. The public space is cathedral-size--there are four levels, and it's 80 feet from floor to ceiling--but since it's square, it also feels oddly constricted. The clear intent is to suggest, again, wealth.

Well, okay, there is a scattering of "Southwestern" design elements. The palm trees could be said to echo the Valley's most persistent (and pernicious--is any tree more useless in the desert?) landscape theme. The columns all wear terra-cotta ziggurats cascading down from their tops, reminiscent of Navajo rug design patterns. And the repeating triangles with sculpted arcs ornamenting the terrace parapets are decidedly Wrightian, drawing on Gammage Auditorium.

But these assorted details hardly add up to "regional" design. An irrigation canal slashing through the palm grove would have evoked more of a sense of place.

Still more from the we've-seen-it-before department: Like most modern malls, the Galleria offers many attractive benches scattered about, giving it the atmosphere of an indoor public park, a place to hang out, relax and people-watch. But one of the unpublicized tenets of mall design is to specify benches that look inviting but feel excruciating, so that the tired shopper will not long loiter on his or her butt, spending no money.