Who invented the shopping mall? The shopping mall was invented by an Austrian architect called Victor Gruen in the 1950s.
Shopping malls are sprawling labyrinths of shops and restaurants that spread out over an enormous area. They are usually out of town and are surrounded by even more enormous car parks to accommodate the masses of people who come. You might think that they evolved organically. Small family owned shops became larger in city supermarkets became larger outer city supermarkets became small collections of outer city shops became a shopping mall. But they actually had an inventor, and his name was Victor Gruen. His image of what a shopping mall would be was actually fairly removed from what they became.
Victor Gruen was born in Austria in 1903. He became an architect, but he emigrated from Austria to the United States in 1939 when the Nazis annexed Austria. He had a hard time to start with because he didn’t speak English, but his ability to design soon shone through and he became well-known as a designer of shop fronts, even designing some famous ones on Fifth Avenue. He started his own architectural firm, called Victor Gruen Associates, and business grew. In 1942, he was asked to submit a proposal for an out of town shopping center, to be built after World War 2 ended. Since the 1930s, the number of out of town supermarkets had grown as car ownership rose. Land out of the city was cheaper and there was more space to build car parks, which meant more customers could visit. The land cost savings and the large number of customers meant these supermarkets could offer much lower prices than in town supermarkets, and their popularity grew. As more people owned cars, the number of houses in the suburbs slowly grew as well. It became more difficult for people to visit downtown and easier to visit out of town stores. The idea for an out of town shopping center came on the back of this.
Gruen managed to make deals with some major department store chains to build the shopping center around. One of the chains was owned by the Dayton family, and they were looking to build a new store in Edina, Minnesota. Gruen realized this would be the perfect location for the shopping center and the funds were raised. Building started in 1954 and the shopping center opened on October 8, 1956. It was called the Southdale Center and it is still in business today. It had a roof and an air conditioning system that kept the building’s temperature at a perfect 24℃, both summer and winter. Minnesota suffers from continentality and has very hot summers and very cold and snowy winters. The shopping center needed to be the perfect climate all year round. It had restaurants, it had courtyards, and three floors with escalators. It was a novel idea and people loved it. It was designed to keep them inside and shopping for as long as possible. Just like the casinos in Vegas, it had everything people needed so they could stay and shop. It was a completely self-contained unit.
We have all visited a mall and we know what they are. If you like shopping they are wonderful. If you don’t they can be terrible. But we know what they are for. They are out of town shopping centers that are easy to reach, have lots of parking, and have every shop or restaurant you could think of. But that is not why Gruen built the southdale center. He thought he was fixing the problem of America’s dependence on cars and the disintegration of city structure. People depended so much on cars, that they didn’t walk to their local shops and the social element of life had disappeared. People didn’t congregate at a coffee shop to talk, as they had done in his hometown in Austria. People drove to the shop, shopped, and drove home. Gruen wanted to recreate that European idea of having a social place to meet, and he thought the mall would be that. His idea was that the mall would be the center, and schools, hospitals, libraries, and small communities would rise up around it. He was basically trying to make 15 minute cities. He wanted to make Americans more social. But, it didn’t happen. The mall needed a giant car park, which pushed the surrounding buildings back and meant more people came from further away. The land became too expensive for schools, and libraries, so developers bought it and put up loads of suburban houses. And the problem Gruen was trying to fix worsened.
Gruen tried again with a few other malls, but the same problem happened each time. Disney actually understood what Gruen was trying to do and he embarked on his own version of it, called Progress City. It would have no cars, everything would be in walking distance, it would be social, and all maintenance vehicles would go under the city, just like in Disneyland. It was a great idea, but Disney died before it could even be started. It would have been great. And this is what I learned today.
Sources
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Gruen
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southdale_Center
Photo by Wendy Wei: https://www.pexels.com/photo/modern-style-shopping-center-with-shiny-floor-and-many-boutiques-4027948/