M. Jeffrey Hardwick - Mall Maker: Victor Gruen, Architect of an American Dream

Mall Maker

Victor Gruen, Architect of an American Dream

M. Jeffrey Hardwick

Copyright 2004 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 191044011

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hardwick, M. Jeffrey.

Mall maker : Victor Gruen, architect of an American dream / M. Jeffrey Hardwick.

p. cm.

ISBN 0-8122-3762-5 (cloth : alk. paper)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Gruen, Victor, 1903 2. Expatriate architectsUnited StatesBiography. 3. ArchitectsAustriaBiography. 4. Stores, RetailUnited StatesHistory20th century. 5. Shopping mallsUnited StatesHistory20th century. I. Title.

NA737.G78 H37 2004

To my parents,
Mark and Helen Hardwick
Thank you

It is our belief that there is much need for actual shopping centersmarket places that are also centers of community and cultural activity. We are convinced that the real shopping center will be the most profitable type of chain store location yet developed, for the simple reason that it will include features to induce people to drive considerable distances to enjoy its advantages.

Victor Gruen, 1948

Gruens most convincing argument is himself and what he has done.

Richard Hubler, Los Angeles Times, 1964

In 1997 the University of Minnesota hosted a conference to figure out that ubiquitous American institution, the mall. The location was significant, since Americas first enclosed mall had opened its doors in nearby Edina forty-one years earlier. Participants took an officially sponsored field trip to ponder Club Snoopy and Legoland at the Mall of America; they looked upon the apotheosis of American consumerism; they agreed on little. Journalists, architects, historians, and sociologists saw different cultural meanings in the 5.2-million-square-foot mall. Grandiose or monstrous? Liberating or oppressive? Entertaining or stupefying? The thinkers could not settle on a simple answer. The panelists offered diverse and often opposing views about Americas immense shopping palace. Did it really mean anything to Americans, or was it just one more place to shop? Had the mall compromised the essence of democracypeople gathering together and voicing their concernsor had it merely redefined public space and personal expression as shopping? And, perhaps, was there an unrealized potential for political or economic mobilization at the mall? Was it the cause or a symptom of Americans love affair with consumption?

The conference participants often contradicted each other. They presented searing critiques about the significance of fountains, ficus trees, parking lots, suburban life, food courts, and shopping itself. One theologian saw a shopping trip to the mall as akin to a medieval pilgrimage. A European architect celebrated Americas commercial frenzy as the triumph of incongruity and complexity. In the end, they agreed on only one thingthe disturbing prevalence of a major retail theory. Dubbed the Gruen Transfer or Gruen Effect, the theory holds that shoppers will be so bedazzled by a stores surroundings that they will be drawnunconsciously, continuallyto shop. The experts pointed to this theory as explaining mall shoppings powerful and pernicious hold on Americas collective psyche. Journalists covering the conference latched onto this unity of opinion. Reporters began their stories by unveiling the Gruen Effect as if by exposing it to light the theory perhaps would evaporate. The reporters, like the panelists, took comfort in the notion that one theory might explain why Americans consume so much and enjoy consuming.

One Minneapolis journalist breathlessly revealed the inner workings of the theory to his readers. In fact, youve already been Gruenized repeatedly and probably dont know it. He summarized how architects strategically manipulate the public with trees, lights, fountains, and colors to make them mindlessly purchase more goods. Mall design is all about the removal of those impediments to the consumer impulse, he explained. The displays are everywhere, the air is dry and clogging, the credit card is in your hand as you march like a POW toward the next display of goodies. The entire shopping mall experience was as if the guards wont let you stop, even for a moment, the process of having fun. That invisible design strategies could manipulate the publics desires was deplorable. For the reporter, the success of American malls was explained by the Gruen Effect. For the rest of us, the theory captures a phenomenon we know all too well. The Minneapolis conference commented on an inevitable experience of late-twentieth-century American lifeshopping in a covered, contained, store-filled mall. Although this event is now so common that it feels like a natural process, the Gruen Effect, shopping malls, and even the all-American love affair with shopping owe much of their feeling and form to the work of one manarchitect Victor Gruen, who had unleashed his vision upon the country forty years earlier as the designer of Southdale, that first mall in Edina.

Gruen, the so-called philosopher and father of the shopping center, became the Minneapolis conferences scapegoat. All the sins of the shopping mall were laid at his feet. He was held responsible for single-handedly shaping the stereotypical cultural wasteland of suburbia. But as with so many apocryphal morality tales, seeing Gruen as a wholly evil figure responsible for the malling of America, the collapse of an earlier communal culture, and Americas consumption mania seems like a rush to judgment. Gruens theory about shopping captures only one aspect of his extraordinarily rich architectural career. And yet, for better or worse, Gruen did help reshape America into a country obsessed with shopping.

At first glance, Gruena fervent socialist and a Jewish refugee from Vienna who escaped Hitlers occupationseems an unlikely villain in the drama of American consumerism. In the early 1960s, Fortune magazine marveled that Gruen had a puzzling background completely remote from the U.S. commercial scene. Within the world of store design, Gruen was extremely fortunate. From the moment he landed in New York City in 1938, he found enthusiastic clients. Beginning with Fifth Avenue boutiques, Gruen helped invent a new aesthetic for retailing. Taking his store modernization theories across the country during World War II, Gruen spread and standardized the new commercial aesthetic. In the postwar years, the successful retail architect would turn to designing paradoxical projects: immense suburban shopping centers and ambitious urban renewal projects.

Gruens American architectural career spanned the years between the dream of the 1939 New York Worlds Fair and the nightmare of the 1968 urban uprisings, an era that witnessed large-scale suburbanization, massive changes in retailing, the triumph of the automobile, white flight, and the economic deterioration of Americas downtowns. As a result of his architectural projects, it is no overstatement to say that he designed and built the popular environments of postwar America. Americans of all classes and races have encountered Gruens architectural dreams. Gruen created the spaces that postwar Americans lived in, moved through, and longed for.