In the centre of Leeds, near the arcades and covered markets that are among the city’s glories, and along its main street, The Headrow, a new shopping complex is about to open that is one of the strangest and most enjoyable contributions that retail has made to a British city for many years. In the alembics where the digital and the physical combine, and shopping and architecture, some alchemy has been brewing. Out of the chemical smoke has popped the surprising new Victoria Gate development.

It is driven by the power and attraction of John Lewis. According to the project’s architect, Friedrich Ludewig, the public consultation usual before such projects are approved was quite a simple affair. When people were invited to comment on the proposals they asked: “Do you want to bring John Lewis here?” “Yes,” replied Ludewig’s practice, Acme, and their developer client, Hammerson. “Thank you very much, that’s all. We’ve been wanting John Lewis here for 40 years.” For its part, the storied store was delighted to be there, Leeds being a large and well-connected urban centre where it has sought a location for decades.

So Leeds loves John Lewis and John Lewis loves Leeds, a romance that has blossomed into a constructional fancy that, if it belies the brand’s image of sober common sense, speaks eloquently of its status. It is baronial, neo-Victorian ornamental, but also a creation of the digital age. It is well made, built to last and crafted, but also automated, cyber-heraldic, robo-gothic. It is wrapped in a grid of diamonds – a diagrid, to use an architectural term – which evokes the ultra-light geodesic structures beloved of the technophile American engineer Buckminster Fuller but realised here in archaising masonry. It took human skill to build it, but it would have been impossible without the ability of digital technology to translate drawings into complex, three-dimensional building components.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Victoria Gate’s exterior ‘evokes the ultra-light geodesic structures beloved of Buckminster Fuller’. Acme Photograph: Acme

The grid pattern, which according to Acme is inspired by Leeds’s traditions of manufacturing textiles, is made of acid-etched concrete, a white-ish material that aspires to be stone but does a good job of being itself. Acme has layered, ribbed and incised it to give a sense of depth and richness. Windows appear as and when John Lewis’s interior layouts require them. The grid’s density varies and its gauge compresses towards the top to give a sense of contained energy, like a compressed spring. The insistent, all-over pattern successfully distracts attention from the fact that, like most department stores, the natural form of the John Lewis building is a big blank box with occasional openings.

The JLP palazzo is the central element of the larger Victoria Gate development, which, says Ludewig, is definitely not a shopping mall but an “arcade”. Robin Dobson, of Hammerson, says it represents a “new era” in places for shopping. “You can’t just build the same environments you’ve done for the last 15 years,” he says, “you have to create places that people want to touch, want to feel, want to be in. The retail is almost secondary. Experience is everything.” This has something to do with the internet: if a shopping centre has to compete with online buying, it has to offer a physical experience that a screen can’t.

It has a jiggery vertical rhythm that Acme compares to certain 'uncomfortable' types of music

The difference between an arcade and a mall might seem moot, but for Ludewig it lies in the extent to which it connects with the city around it and in the degree of influence the architect has in shaping its spaces. Commonly architecture retreats before the attention-grabbing shop fronts of individual tenants. Here, the idea is to create coherent and memorable places in which the products find their place. Dobson says “it has a bit more architecture than we usually have”. Stefano Dal Piva, of Acme, says that “retail is often not seen as cool by architects but architecture can do something with it. It is what makes the public space.”

Victoria Gate takes strands of Leeds’s architectural DNA and mutates them. The new development draws on the arcades, in particular the County Arcade circa 1900, now called Victoria Quarter, where the great theatrical architect Frank Matcham turned his talent for spectacle to a lush stage set for retail desire. The Acme complex, a neighbour of Matcham’s, contributes a conjoined pair of arcades, one curved and the other straight, where the Edwardian ornament of curlicues, volutes and marbleised pilasters is cross-fertilised with the John Lewis elevations to breed diagrid vaults, diamond-patterned walls, herringbone floor patterns, chandeliers like futurist pinecones and rippling bands of shop windows in convex-straight-convex rhythms of glass.

A further influence is the set piece architecture of The Headrow that runs downhill from Leeds’s thunderous Corinthian-columned town hall towards what was once the rougher end of town. Along one side is a long run of belated Edwardian style, actually 20s and 30s, where the city fathers hired the not especially good architect Sir Reginald Blomfield to do a version of the neo-baroque buildings he had designed in Regent Street in London. It is in red brick embellished in Portland stone, especially at the corners and centres of blocks. The detail gets more meagre as the road heads towards areas more easterly, low-lying and poor.

The Headrow once formed a coherent composition at its far end, along with the long-demolished Quarry Hill housing estate, but one progressively dismantled by clumsy traffic engineering and poor planning, a disaggregation continued by Victoria Gate. One half of a pair of complementary Blomfieldian terraces was demolished to make room for the development as a whole and to give the new John Lewis its desired prominence. A multistorey car park was inserted to bring cars as close as possible to its retail floors.

Not many people seem to have minded, including Historic England, which had never deemed this stretch worthy of listing. What happened instead was that Acme processed Blomfield’s details, as if through recombinant software, into pixelated zigzagging brickwork on to the not John Lewis part of the development. It has a jiggery vertical rhythm that Acme compares to certain “uncomfortable” types of music: “there’s a bit of surprise, a bit of randomness, something to make you look twice”. As in the prewar buildings, corners and centres are marked with pale masonry curves. The car park, meanwhile, is given a further type of treatment, with aluminium strips twisted to suggest yet more diamond patterns.

You might call the whole riotous or exuberant, except that it is also cool and mechanical. It is promiscuous. It allows where necessary the power of selling to trump architectural scruple. In the liberties it takes with architectural historical decorum, it has something in common with older Leeds retail architecture, such as a 1939 Marks and Spencer in glossy black deco-Tuscan and a Debenhams in a skinnier, frillier, zigzagging deco-Egyptian. It is near-kitsch. Its weakest moments come when one ornamental feature encounters another – as when a diagrid ceiling meets a diamond-patterned wall – and they fail to join up. But it’s entertaining. It energises. Like its predecessors, it shows how shopping can enhance a city, not kill it.