[Extra] History of shopping mall - Focusing on The Terrazzo Jungle

History of shopping mall

Focusing on The Terrazzo Jungle

  Shopping malls are symbols of suburban life in the United Sates. The idea for this most American of architectural landmarks, however, came from a European immigrant, Victor Gruen. Victor Gruen grew up in Vienna, Austria, studying architecture at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts. At night, Gruen performed theater in smoke-filled cafes around the city. When Hitler`s Nazis invaded Austria in 1938, Gruen decided to emigrate. One of his theater friends - posing as an officer in a Nazi uniform - drove Gruen and his wife to the airport. They took the first plane they could catch to Zurich, Switzerland, made their way to England, and then obtained passage on a ship bound for New York. They landed in the United States, as Gruen later rememberd, "with an architect's degree, eight dollars, and no English." One day, Gruen went for a walk in midtown Manhattan and ran into a old friend from Vienna who wanted to open a leather-goods boutique on Fifth Avenue. Gruen agreed to design it, and the result was a revolutionary storefront, with a kind of mini-arcade in the entranceway: six exquisite glass cases, spotlights, and faux marble, with green corrugated glass on the ceiling. It was a "customer trap." This was a brand-new idea in American retail design, particularly on Fifth Avenue, where all the storefronts were facing the street. The critics raved. 

 Gruen designed Ciro's on Fifth Avenue, Steckle's on Broadway, Paris Decorators on the Bronx Concourse, and eleven branches of the California clothing chain Grayson's. In the early 1950s, he designed an outdoor shopping center called Northland, outside Detroit, Michigan. It covered one hundred and sixty-three acres and had nearly ten thousand parking spaces. This was little more than a decade and a half since he had stepped off the boat. When Gruen watched the bulldozers break ground, he turned to his partner and said, "We've got a lot of nerve." Grune's most famous creation was his next project, in the town of Edina, just outside Minneapolis, Minnesota. It was called Southdale Mall. Until then, most shopping centers had been what architects like to call "extroverted," meaning that store windows and entrances faced both the parking area and the interior pedestrian walkways. Southdale was "introverted"- the exterior walls were blank, and all the activity was focused on the inside. Suburban shopping centers had always been in the open, with stores connected by outdoor passageways. Gruen had the radical idea of putting the whole complex under one roof, with air-conditioning in the summer and heating in the winter. Work on Southdale began in 1954. It cost twenty million dollars and took two years to construct. It had seventy-two stores and two anchor department stores, Donaldson's on one end and Dayton's on the other. 

   Almost every other major shopping center was on a single level, which made for long walks. Gruen's approach was to put stores on two levels, connected by escalators and fed by two-tiered parking. In the middle, he put a kind of town square : a "garden court" under a skylight, with a fishpound, enormous sculpted trees, a twenty-one-foot cage filled with brightly colored birds, balconies with hanging plants, and a cafe. The result was a sensation. Journalists from all of the country's top publications came for Southdale's opening. "The Splashiest Center in the U.S.,"wrote one magazine. "A pleasure dome with parking," cheered another. One journalist announced that overnight Southdale had become an integral "part of the American Way." 

   It simulated a magnetic urban downtown area In the middle of suburbia: the variety, the individuality, the lights, the color, and the crowds. This downtown essence was enhanced by all kinds of things that ought to be there if downtown areas weren't so noisy and dirty and chaotic, such as sidewalk, cafes, art, islands of planting, and pretty paving. Other shopping centers, however pleasant, seemed provincial in contrast with the real thing,the city's downtown. In Mineapolis, however, it was the downtown that appeared small and provincial in contrast to Southdale's metropolitan character. One person who wasn't dazzled by Gruen's concept was the famous architect Frank Lloyd Wright. When it came to malls, it was only Victor Gruen's vision that mattered. Southdale Mall still exists-a big concrete box in a sea of parking. The anchor tenants are now J.C,Penney and Marshall Field's, and there is just about every other chain store that you've ever seen in a mall. It does not seen like a historic building, which is precisely why it is one. 

  Fifty years ago, Victor Gruen designed a fully enclosed, introverted, multitiered, double-anchor shopping complex with a garden court under a skylight. Today, virtually every regional shopping center in America is a fully enclosed, introverted, multitiered, double-anchor complex with a garden court under a skylight. Victory Gruen didn't design a building; he designed an archetype. Over the past half century that archetype-for what Gruen himself has clled "a gigantic shopping machine"- has been reproduced so faithfully so many thousands of times that today nearly every suburban resident goes shopping or wanders around or hangs out in a Southdale facsimile at least once or twice a month. Victor Gruen may well have been the most influential architect of the twentieth century.