Victor Gruen - Biography

Victor David Gruen, born Viktor David Grünbaum (July 18, 1903 - February 14, 1980), was an Austrian-born commercial architect best known as a pioneer in the design of shopping malls in the United States.

Biography

Gruen was born in Vienna and studied architecture at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts. A committed socialist, from 1926 until 1934 he ran the "political cabaret at the Naschmarkt"-theatre. At that time he came to know Felix Slavik, the future mayor of Vienna, and they became friends. When Germany annexed Austria in 1938, he emigrated to the United States. Short and stout, he landed "with an architect's degree, eight dollars, and no English." Arriving in New York he changed his name to Gruen from Grünbaum and started to work as a draftsman.

In 1941 he moved to Los Angeles and in 1951 he founded the architectural firm "Victor Gruen Associates", which was soon to become one of the major planning offices of that time.

After the war, he designed the first suburban open-air shopping facility called Northland Mall near Detroit in 1954. After the success of the first project, he designed his best known work for the owners of Dayton Department stores, the Southdale Mall, the first enclosed shopping mall in the country in Edina, Minnesota. Opening in 1956, Southdale was meant as the kernel of a full-fledged community. The mall was commercially successful, but the original design was never fully realized, as the intended apartment buildings, schools, medical facilities, park and lake were not built. Because he invented the modern mall, Malcolm Gladwell, writing in The New Yorker, suggested that "Victor Gruen may well have been the most influential architect of the twentieth century."

Gruen was the principal architect for a luxury housing development built on the site of Boston, Massachusetts' former West End neighborhood. The first of several Gruen towers and plazas was completed in 1962. This development, known as Charles River Park is regarded by many as a dramatically ruthless re-imagining of a former immigrant tenement neighborhood (Gans, O'Conner, The Hub).

Victor Gruen designed the 55,000 square-meter, business complex, Centre Gefinor, which was built in the late 1960s on Rue Clémenceau in Beirut, Lebanon.

Gruen also designed the Greengate Mall in Greensburg, Pennsylvania which opened in 1965, as well as the Lakehurst Mall in 1971 for Waukegan, IL. Despite Gruen's efforts in the United States, in 1978, two years before his death in a country house outside Vienna, Gruen disavowed other shopping mall developments as having "bastardized" his ideas.

References in other media

The Gruen Effect. Victor Gruen and the Shopping Mall. Documentary by Anette Baldauf and Katharina Weingartner, Austria/USA 2010, 54 min. see http://www.thegrueneffect.com

The Gruen Transfer, a television programme in Australia, references Victor Gruen and the Gruen transfer.

Selected writings

• Victor Gruen, Larry Smith: Shopping towns USA: The planning of shopping centers, Reinhold, New York, 1960
• Victor Gruen: The heart of our cities: The urban crisis: diagnosis and cure, Thames and Hudson, London, 1965
• Victor Gruen: Centers for the urban environment: Survival of the cities, Van Nostrand Reinhold, New York, 1973

See also

• Gruen transfer
• Midtown Plaza (Rochester)
• South Coast Plaza
• Fox Plaza (San Francisco)
• Gateway Center (Newark)

• Fulton Mall (Fresno)
• Randhurst Mall
• Twelve Oaks Mall
• Port Plaza Mall
• Cherry Hill Mall

Further reading

• Alex Wall, Victor Gruen: From Urban Shop to New City, Actar, Barcelona, 2006, ISBN 978-84-95951-87-8
• M. Jeffrey Hardwick, ''Mall Maker: Victor Gruen, Architect of an American Dream, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003, ISBN 978-0-8122-3762-7
• Anette Baldauf, ''Shopping Town USA: Victor Gruen, the Cold War, and the Shopping Mall". In: Mute 30.1. 2008

External links

• The New Yorker on the Gruen biography by Hardwick, Mall Maker.
• Mall Hall of Fame Victor Gruen's Malls