The lurid shopping mall

I have been highly critical of the urban shopping mall of late and I thought it might be worthwhile exploring how this monstrosity came into existence. The very first shopping mall, Southdale Mall, was opened in 1956 in Edina, Minnesota as the creation of an Austrian-born architect name Victor Gruen. With a Jewish background, he was forced to flee Vienna in 1938 and made a new home in America.

Malcolm Gladwell has written a terrific account of the story in “The Terrazo Jungle” from The New Yorker, 15th March 2004. It is 6 pages long so I’ve taken the liberty of extracting a couple of my favourite quotes. 

At an address to the Progressive Architecture awards ceremony in New Orleans, not long after the construction of Southdale Mall, Gruen lashed out American suburbia, describing the roads as 

“avenues of horror,” “flanked by the greatest collection of vulgarity—billboards, motels, gas stations, shanties, car lots, miscellaneous industrial equipment, hot dog stands, wayside stores—ever collected by mankind.”

He had intended for his shopping mall to be a little bit of Europe in America by providing a car-free urban space where people from all walks of life could socialize and mingle at their leisure. His original plan included residential housing, schools, medical centres, a park and a lake, but these were never realised. 

Later in his life, by which time shopping malls had become the staple of American suburbia, Gladwell writes:

…he revisited one of his old shopping centers, and saw all the sprawling development around it, and pronounced himself in “severe emotional shock.” 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.” It was putting the beloved independent shopkeepers of Vienna out of business. It was crushing the life of his city. He was devastated. Victor Gruen invented the shopping mall in order to make America more like Vienna. He ended up making Vienna more like America.