The Corruption of the Shopping Mall

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The Corruption of the Shopping Mall Search by Deb Olin Unferth Alternative Medical Clinics Arts & Entertainment Austrian Victor Gruen is known as the father of the shopping mall. Gruen holds the world record Business & Professional for building the most shopping space in a single lifetime at 44,500,000 square feet. His designs Certification & Degrees became the mall model and nearly every shopping center in the world bears his mark. Yet in the Conferences & Workshops Counseling & Therapy late fifties and sixties as malls cropped up all over the United States, the great paradox of Victor Healing & Wellness Gruen unfolded. He looked out at his creation and was appalled. The shopping mall, he concluded, Health and Beauty is a powerful evil. Holistic Animal Care Holistic Dentistry His story begins in Vienna where he started out as Victor David Grünbaum, an architecture Intuitive Arts student, an actor, and a Jew in 1930s Austria. Like all Jews in that place and time, he suffered. He Learning was insulted, harassed, and forced into hard labor. Yet the wild, spirited Gruen joined an anti- Life Strategy & Coaching Nazi cabaret and strode the stage in Nazi uniform, imitated Hitler, and performed satiric skits. Massage & Bodywork Movement & Fitness Then one day in 1938, the Gestapo closed in on him. Natural Foods Natural Home Later his daughter-in-law would record the harrowing tale, how the Nazis took over his office, lay Nonprofits in wait for him at his home. Alone and desperate, Gruen found himself fleeing, sprinting through Nutrition & Dining the streets. He ran to the little theater where he performed and pulled a uniform out of a trunk. In Parenting & Family the disguise of a Nazi lieutenant he made it to an airstrip and flew out of the country with nothing Sexuality but his trade tool T-square, a dog-eared book by Voltaire, and eight dollars. Spiritual Practices Travel & Retreats Yoga Gruen left Europe, that world of old cities, winding streets, and teeming plazas. He changed his name and came to the U.S., arriving only a few years before the population shift of post-war New! Reach Millions of America. These were the years of the automobile, of new highways, the GI bill, single-family tract Values-Based Consumers housing and the advent of suburbia. Advertisers: - Access our publisher From his Los Angeles office, Gruen watched the suburbs grow. He watched the inevitable database FREE for a problems develop, the lack of places to shop, and the strips of stores thrown up along streets limited time - Get a 20% discount on optimistically called "miracle miles." These strips became slums choked with cars. ads during our beta period - Save time with our self - Gruen had a solution. What the suburbs are missing, he said, is a city center. People in the city serve system stroll from shop to shop, play chess in the park, visit museums, or simply sit on benches in public Publishers: squares and chat. The city, as Gruen framed it, is a place where chance encounters occur and - Get FREE membership small events blossom into friendship, love, art, change. The city is a place where ideas spread. for a limited time - Sell more online ad In the suburbs, Gruen lamented, people live in isolated plots and move quickly from car to house, inventory bundled against the elements. Importantly, they have no place to build a community. Gruen - Provide your audience more high-quality wanted a gathering center for people in the suburbs akin to the downtown city square. It would be advertisers aesthetically beautiful like the old cities of Europe. There would be light, water, nature — and www.GreenAds.com plenty of parking.

His great breakthrough came in 1956 when he built the Southdale Center outside Minneapolis. He Reach Millions of Values- put in sky-lights, fountains, magnolia trees, and orchids. Canaries flitted about in a giant elegant Based Consumers... cage. But what made Southdale different from anything before it, so different that it would change ...here and on other sites within the GreenAds the suburban landscape forever, was that it was seventy-two degrees Fahrenheit. He enclosed the Network. Find out more, mall and made the first year-round, climate-controlled shopping center. click here! www.GreenAds.com In his book Shopping Towns, U.S.A. he described his mall as a town with libraries and art and orchestras, with neighbors and families and lovers. But it is more than a town, better than a town. In Gruen's town, no one gets cold and there's always a parking space.

How did he come up with the concept? Gruen's model for the shopping center was based on the ideas of Le Corbusier, the radical French architect. Le Corbusier believed in the automobile but with its advent he saw that the tight winding cities of Europe would have to be drastically reconstructed to make way for it. He envisioned tall sparkling towers connected by super highways surrounded by park-like open spaces. The towers would come in two sizes: sky-scraper for commercial use and medium-height for residences. The residential buildings would be complete communities with schools and gardens and more. The landscape would be formally and geometrically beautiful and at the same time functional and respectful of nature.

One of Le Corbusier's visionary residential buildings is in Nantes, France — the only one, in fact, still being used as he intended. The building has community rooms, a library, a school on the roof. The two-floor apartments are ingeniously designed to span both sides of the building so that every apartment gets both southern and northern light. The indoor corridors are called rues, or streets, to emphasize the community feel, as later Gruen will give the same name to his line of indoor storefronts.

Le Corbusier's ideas take some getting used to. A commentator writes in the introduction to one of his books, "The result may seem a little terrifying at first sight." Indeed, the Le Corbusier building — the precursor to the modern mall — looks bizarre against the French landscape. It juts fiercely, a heavy concrete block looming over the charming tangle of little houses and narrow winding streets.

To this model, Gruen added the ideas of Le Corbusier's contemporary and competitor, Camille Sitte. Sitte envisioned a technologically modern city with old world architecture — the plazas and ornamentation of the medieval and Renaissance periods, the corridor streets that create a sense of intimacy. From Sitte, Gruen took the image of the town squares of Europe and he learned to introduce adornment. He insisted his malls have fountains, statues, and commissioned artwork.

When Gruen arrived in the U.S. in 1938, there were only four structures that could be called shopping centers. Developers copied his model and malls began to spring up around the country. The profit-obsessed imitators threw out the Sitte designs, disregarding Gruen's insistence on beauty and natural light resulting in stark and colorless malls. They took out the comfortable seating areas (people who are sitting aren't shopping) and expertly hid exits so that confused shoppers would have to pass more stores.

It is difficult to say exactly when Gruen first felt the shudder of remorse over the corruption of his mall concept. It came gradually but with increasing force and urgency. Some commentators say he had doubts from the very beginning. They call it "the Gruen guilt" that eventually overcame him. He saw no budding community, no town, no orchestra. "I refuse to pay alimony for those bastard developments," he said miserably. Years later, in 1999, U.S. News and World Report will use that quotation ironically as they name him one of the twenty-five shapers of the modern era.

Today, of course, developers claim to be bringing back the Gruen ideal. Malls have merry-go- rounds, waterfalls, ice-skating rinks. Teenagers roam in packs and senior citizens take mall-walks. One reporter wrote, "One would like to bring Victor Gruen back to life for just a day" in order to take him to the modern mall. He would be proud.

But arguably, today's malls are a far cry from Gruen's original concept that was less about recreation and entertainment. Rather, his concept promoted sustainability. He lamented that building suburbs enabled us to gobble up the landscape mowing down everything natural and beautiful. "It is the unique accomplishment of our era," he wrote, "that, for the first time, we are able to destroy faster than nature can replenish."

All that said, the mutation of his mall concept may also have wounded Gruen on a deep and personal level. Malls, contrary to the architect's vision, are not public spaces where people roam freely any time of day. Malls are privately owned, managed, and policed. Their locations are chosen along racial and economic lines. Many city elements are not welcome: the beggar, the stray piece of garbage, the religious pamphlet, the protest, the political speech — what else and who else could be excluded? Chain stores have replaced independent businesses so wares look the same across the mall, the country, the world. "Hell," Gruen wrote, is "inescapable sameness." He called malls "concentration camps" and wrote that they may eventually cause "civic unrest."

Gruen began to see his miscalculation not long after his first couple of malls were built. But then, of course, it was too late. People streamed to the suburbs, abandoning downtowns. He rallied for revitalize-the-city projects that involved tearing apart the downtown and rebuilding it from scratch — and this time, no cars allowed. He built pedestrian urban malls for Kalamazoo, Michigan, Fresno, California, and other towns. Most of them have been bleak failures, torn down or left as near-empty shells. The Kalamazoo Mall reopened for cars in 1998 in a desperate last attempt to save it. Finally, in 1967, the 64-year- old Gruen moved back to Vienna in defeat and wrote passionate, vehement articles and books condemning the automobile and suburbia.

Today, Gruen Associates still flourishes in Los Angeles but specializes in government buildings, its latest project being the U.S. embassy in Berlin. In the years since Gruen's death in 1980, the firm has built its share of suburban and urban malls. But a firm spokesman says there's less demand for malls today. He points out that they are now superseded by mega malls. One such monster mall is Minneapolis' Mall of America. This behemoth stands not far from Victor Gruen's legendary Southdale Center, the architect's first enclosed mall and the embodiment of his gallant — but failed — effort.

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