Volume 2 Number 221 Victor Gruen and the Shopping Mall Lead: Victor

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Volume 2 Number 221 Victor Gruen and the Shopping Mall Lead: Victor Gruen surveyed his creation and was deeply disappointed. Intro: A Moment in Time with Dan Roberts. Content: When Gruen arrived in America in 1938 on the SS Staatendam he was penniless. One of Austria's most promising young architects, just as he was beginning to receive lucrative contracts to provide innovative designs for Vienna's department stores, Adolf Hitler's Nazi cronies took over the country in the Anschluss. Gruen got out in time and soon established himself in the United States as a commercial architect of great creativity. His first project was the Lederer Store in New York City in 1939, but by the 1950s he and his associates were focusing on ways of making life more pleasant and efficient for those living in the fast-growing cities of America. One of Gruen's most persistent dreams was to concentrate retail business activity in central locations, thus reorganizing the way people did business and bringing something similar to European living areas to the United States. Victor Gruen was the pioneer developer of the regional shopping center. He got inspiration for the idea from the markets areas of medieval European villages as well as great commercial structures such as Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II in Milan. The idea goes even further back. During Roman times towns would concentrate trade in certain commodities such as meat and vegetables in macellum, market buildings consisting of shops around a colonnaded court. Gruen's first shopping center was Northland in Detroit in 1952 followed by the first covered mall, Southdale, in Minneapolis, which opened in 1956. This last had two large anchor department stores with a covered central courtyard surrounded by additional smaller shops. So said the ads, "In Southdale Center, everyday will be a perfect shopping day." His reputation grew until he was being called on to design whole downtown areas of such cities as Fort Worth, Texas, his hometown of Vienna and for the Shah of Iran, the new urban outline of Teheran, the capital city. Essayist Phil Patton says that Gruen's disappointment came from the way developer's took his idea for a richer and more humane environment, applied American efficiency and created standardized cookie cutter stores indistinguishable from one city to the next and malls, inserted with little concern for their surroundings into suburbs far from city center he had hoped to revive. Gruen returned to Vienna and died there in 1980. At the University of Richmond, this is Dan Roberts. Copyright by Dan Roberts Enterprises, Inc. Resources Gruen, Victor. Heart of Our Cities. London, UK: Thames and Hudson Publishing Company, 1964. Patton, Phil. "Agents of Change," American Heritage 45 (8, December, 1994), 92-109. .

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