Is it safe to say that America has a love-hate relationship with shopping malls? Even their creator eventually came to despise what the American shopping mall had become. There’s an interesting article in this past week’s New Yorker (“The Terrazzo Jungle” by Malcolm Gladwell) on Victor Gruen (1903-80), Viennese architect and emigré:
Fifty years ago, Victor Gruen designed a fully enclosed, introverted, multitiered, double-anchor-tenant shopping complex with a garden court under a skylight—and today virtually every regional shopping center in America is a fully enclosed, introverted, multitiered, double-anchor-tenant complex with a garden court under a skylight. Victor Gruen didn’t design a building; he designed an archetype. [… He] may well have been the most influential architect of the twentieth century. He invented the mall.
Later in life Gruen fell into disillusion. His idealistic vision of planned community spaces, recalling European city squares, had been taken by developers in a different direction.
Malls, he said, had been disfigured by “the ugliness and discomfort of the land-wasting seas of parking” around them. Developers were interested only in profit. “I refuse to pay alimony for those bastard developments,” he said in a speech in London, in 1978. He turned away from his adopted country. He had fixed up a country house outside of Vienna, and soon he moved back home for good. But what did he find when he got there? Just south of old Vienna, a mall had been built—in his anguished words, a “gigantic shopping machine.” […] Victor Gruen invented the shopping mall in order to make America more like Vienna. He ended up making Vienna more like America.
Related: review of Mall Maker, a Gruen biography; article entitled “The Corruption of the Shopping Mall.”