The Market Place

The Market Place is an outdoor shopping center located in Orange County, California that straddles the borders of Tustin and Irvine. Opened in 1988, the center is located along Jamboree Road, just northeast of Interstate 5. Anchor tenants include Best Buy, Barnes & Noble, Dick's Sporting Goods, Lowe's, The Home Depot, Target, Babies R' Us, and Edwards Theaters. The property is owned and managed by The Irvine Company.DesignThe Market Place covers an area of 165acre and has more than 120 stores, restaurants, cafes and theaters. Designed by Mexican architect Ricardo Legorreta, it consists of monumental but extremely simplified cubic forms, with anchor stores marked by massive towers roughly 70ft high displaying the store name. The center is also unique in that all the store signs are displayed in neon. The overall design operates on the idea that center's tenants add most of the color and character to the otherwise plain center, a concept that had previously (though unsuccessfully) been attempted with Britain's Tricorn Centre. The buildings are arranged in a ring around a large central series of parking lots and fast-food restaurants. The center on the whole has a "desert" look to it, with parking lots shaded under groves of date palms, and extensive rock landscaping around the perimeter of the center. The parking lots are illuminated by arrays of xenon floodlights set inside the peaks of 100ft high towers. The buildings themselves are uniformly surfaced in bright orange, purple, and pink stucco.