Good grief, more misplaced Sert worship.
The Holyoke Center is an awkward, compromised building even today, but anyone who knows the history of that building knows that it was a windswept bunker as designed, and had to be heavily reworked to be marginally functional after the overrated master was long in his grave.
Here's a snippet describing the overhaul of the Holyoke Center arcade from a Harvard University Gazette article from 2000:
"What was originally designed as nothing more than a windy thoroughfare linking Harvard Yard with the river houses has emerged as a bustling center of activity, shopping, food, and art. The transformation has taken time, money, and a great deal of strategic planning.
To fully appreciate the transformation, one must go back to the days when the arcade was an open-air passageway, devoid of any major retail use, and often filled with more transients than students. Nike Damaskos, the assistant director of leasing, who grew up in Cambridge, remembers the arcade as a dangerous and dank "wind tunnel" that repelled more visitors than it attracted.
"It was a dysfunctional space at the core of the campus," says Scott Levitan, director of university and commercial real estate. "It was a very challenging design problem to bring [the arcade] up to a standard that would be useful."
So do Catalonians innately know how cities function? Certainly Barcelona functions well as a city, but that seems 99% the accumulation of prior centuries' efforts, before the modernist cult took over. Is there any evidence that Sert had any grip on urban functionality, based on the tangible evidence provided by his work on the Harvard campus? The answer to that is a resounding "NO," unless we are to attribute intention to his success in providing the homeless with an abode slightly more approachable and less depressing than the one he designed for graduate students (Peabody Terrace).
Back to the buildings at hand: it's a cop out to blame zoning for the fact that Kyu Sung Woo's latest effort is as almost as much a bunker as its awful Corbu/Sert predecessors. Zoning doesn't require the damned hedges. Nor is retail the only possible means of creating street-level interplay (although it is often a good one). No, the problem is that for the starchitect, the "positive space/negative space" schtick takes precedence over functionality and approachability.