The Start of the Modern Shopping Mall
Did you know that Southdale Center in Edina was the first indoor mall in the world? I did not! It was designed by Victor Gruen who is known as the creator of the modern shopping mall.
According to this article, Gruen had a specific vision while designing this mall. Hailing from Vienna, Gruen wished to recreate the quintennial European town center within an enclosed shopping mall. When Gruen fled Austria in 1938 he came to the US and saw how reliant suburban America was on cars, especially how reliant retail America was on passing automobiles. Greun didn’t view cars in a pleasant light, calling them “a threat to human life and health.” He wished to get people out from the driver’s seat and walking. Enter his vision of a highly walkable and interesting shopping mall.
The original plan for Southdale Center was for retail spaces to be mixed in with attractions such as fountains and works of art, even an aviary. The mall would be an interesting space within a diverse community to shelter the visitors from cars.
According to the article, Gruen’s vison didn’t turn out quite as he had hoped. The only things built out of his design was the large amounts of car parking and the mall, which was no longer an interesting mixed-use space. Instead, it became the modern day mall of only large retail stores surrounded by swaths of parking. In fact, there’s a phenomenon named after Victor Gruen: the Gruen Transfer. How many times have you gone into a mall for one specific thing, and came out with bags of items? Essentially, that’s the Gruen Transfer. Malls became designed to be chaotic and to distract the consumer from the reason they came in and giving the consumer a general desire to shop. We want to window shop, look at the sales, see what’s new, even just hanging out at the mall. Spending money on things that we didn’t know we wanted. Something tells me Gruen wouldn’t be too happy about using his name for this - consumerism for the sake of consumerism.
(This also reminds me of a casino - no clocks, no windows, bright lights, sounds, etc. that keep people interested and sitting in there for hours.)
Greun wasn’t too happy with that happened at Southdale, so he moved on to Fort Worth, TX where he tried to push cars out of downtown by using highways as a buffer between cars and pedestrians instead of bisecting cities. You can guess how that went. Greun later left the US and went back to Vienna. Ironically, at the same time when Austria’s largest mall was being constructed.
We all know where malls currently stand; I live near Maplewood Mall and frequently drive by empty parking lot and empty storefronts. Maybe Gruen’s vision for an interesting space will have a resurgence.
Greun wrote a book with his ideas titled Shopping Towns USA: The Planning of Shopping Centers, which has been archived by the Library of Congress and available to read here.
-Jess