Victor Gruen: Inventor of the enclosed shopping mall hated suburbs and sprawl!

[thelakelander]

Talk about an idea that back-fired big time.  Here is a link to an interesting article about Victor Gruen.  Gruen was a Vienna-born Architect who came up with the idea of the enclosed shopping mall in the mid-1950s.  He thought the shopping mall would help revitalize downtown areas and urbanize the suburbs, which he hated.  Instead, his invention literally killed half of America's urban cores within a 30 year time frame.

As we imagine ways to repurpose these aging monoliths and what the next generation of retail should look like, it’s worth recalling Gruen’s odd legacy. He hated suburbia. He thought his ideas would revitalize cities. He wanted to bring urban density to the suburbs. And he envisioned shopping malls as our best chance at containing sprawl.

"He said great quotes on suburbia being 'soulless' and 'in search of a heart,'" says Jeff Hardwick, who wrote the Gruen biography Mall Maker. "He just goes on and on with these critiques. And they occur really early in his writing as well. So it’s not as if he ends up bemoaning suburbia later. He’s critiquing suburbia pretty much from the get-go, and of course the remedy he offers is the shopping mall."

In Edina, those plans for a whole town anchored around the mall were never executed, and perhaps Gruen was naïve to think the developers of shopping malls would also be interested in developing entire communities. At the time, Gruen believed that by locating all of a community’s shopping needs in an enclosed mall, with a nondescript exterior, we could do away with the "commercial blight" of scattered hot-dog stands and gas stations and neon storefronts that made America, in his eyes, so ugly.

But the property value around Southdale quickly went up. And instead of developing the full 500-acre site, Dayton’s sold off chunks of it for what would become the kind of "anonymous mass housing" Gruen detested, and precisely more of the commercial sprawl he wanted to eradicate. Repeatedly, his plans did not turn out as he had imagined them, and later in life he bitterly lamented that Americans had debased his ideas.

Full article: http://www.theatlanticcities.com/arts-and-lifestyle/2012/07/shopping-mall-turns-60-and-prepares-retire/2568/