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Victor Gruen

 
Architecture and Landscaping: Victor David Gruen
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(1903–80)

Viennese architect, born Grünbaum, he settled in the USA in 1938. He established his own firm in Los Angeles (1951), specializing in out- of-town shopping-centres including the Northland Center, Detroit, Mich. (1954), the Southdale Center, Minneapolis, MN (1956), and the first inner-city enclosed shopping-mall at Midtown Plaza, Rochester, NY (1962). He also designed The Mall, Fresno, CA (1968). His ideas are encapsulated in his The Heart of Our Cities (1964, but have been questioned by several commentators. He was virtually the inventor of the mid-C20 shopping-mall, which has proved a mixed blessing.

Bibliography

  • Fitch (1961)
  • Gruen(1964, 1973)
  • Gruen & L.Smith (1960)
  • Hardwick(2004)
  • J.Jacobs (1961)
  • Tunnard & Pushkarev (1981)

The full bibliography for this book is available to download as a pdf file.
Download the bibliography for A Dictionary of Architecture and Landscape Architecture (PDF: 1.2MB)

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Columbia Encyclopedia: Victor Gruen
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Gruen, Victor (grū'ən), 1903-80, American architect, often called the inventor of the modern shopping mall, b. Vienna as Viktor David Grünbaum. In Vienna, he studied at the Technological Institute and Academy of Fine Arts, worked for Peter Behrens, and opened (1933) his own architectural firm. He fled Nazi Germany's annexation of Austria, moving (1938) to the United States and becoming a citizen (1943). His innovative design for the Lederer leather-goods shop (1939) on New York's Fifth Avenue was the first of several early retail projects. In 1951 he founded Victor Gruen Associates, bringing together an outstanding group of architects, engineers, and planners. The firm proved to be a major force in the design of renovated center cities and in the creation of the large shopping malls that came to dominate suburban commerce and entertainment. As an urban planner, Gruen was instrumental in formulating master plans for such cities as Fort Worth, Tex. (1955), Kalamazoo, Mich. (1958), Cincinnati, Ohio (1963), Fresno, Calif. (1965), and Tehran (1963-67). Among his most notable shopping-complex projects are the Northland Center (1954) in suburban Detroit; the Southdale Center (1956) in Edina, Minn., outside Minneapolis, America's first enclosed mall; the Cherry Hill Mall (1961), in the New Jersey suburbs of Philadelphia; and Midtown Plaza (1962), Rochester, N.Y.

Bibliography

See his Shopping Towns USA: The Planning of Shopping Centers (with L. Smith, 1960), Heart of Our Cities: Dianosis and Cure (1964), and Centers for the Urban Environment: Survival of the Cities (1973); biography by M. J. Hardwick (2004).

Wikipedia: Victor Gruen
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Victor David Gruen, born Viktor David Grünbaum[1] (July 18, 1903 - February 14, 1980), was an Austrian-born commercial architect.

Gruen was born in Vienna and studied architecture at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts. A committed socialist, from 1926 until 1934 he ran the "political cabaret at the Naschmarkt"-theatre. At that time he came to know Felix Slavik, the future mayor of Vienna, and they became friends. When Germany took over Austria in 1938, he emigrated to the United States. Short and stout, he landed "with an architect's degree, eight dollars, and no English."[citation needed] Arriving in New York he changed his name to Gruen and started to work as a draftsman.

In 1941 he moved to Los Angeles and in 1951 he founded the architectural firm "Victor Gruen Associates" which was soon to become one of the major planning offices of that time.

After the war, he designed the first suburban open-air shopping facility called Northland Mall near Detroit in 1954. After the success of the first project, he designed his best known work for the owners of Dayton Department stores, the 800,000-square-foot (74,000 m2) Southdale Mall, the first enclosed shopping mall in the country in Edina, Minnesota. Opening in 1956, Southdale was meant as the kernel of a full-fledged community. The mall was commercially successful, but the original design was never fully-realized, as the intended apartment buildings, schools, medical facilities, park and lake were not built. However, because he invented the modern mall, The New Yorker posed the notion "Victor Gruen may well have been the most influential architect of the twentieth century."[2]

Gruen was also the principal architect for a luxury housing development built on the 48 acre site of Boston, Massachusetts' former West End neighborhood. The first of several Gruen towers and plazas was completed in 1962. This development, known as CharlesRiver Park is regarded by many as a dramatically ruthless re-imagining of a former immigrant tenement neighborhood (Gans, O'Conner, The Hub).

Gruen also built Greengate Mall in Greensburg, Pennsylvania, in the 1960s. He designed Lakehurst Mall in 1971 for Waukegan, IL. Despite Gruen's efforts in the United States, in 1978, two years before his death in a country house outside Vienna, Gruen disavowed other shopping mall developments as having "bastardized" his idea.

See also

References

  1. ^ http://www.infoplease.com/ce6/people/A0932969.html retrieved Jun 11, 2008
  2. ^ Malcolm Gladwell, The Terrazzo Jungle, The New Yorker, March 15, 2004, Accessed June 12, 2009.
  • Alex Wall, Victor Gruen: From Urban Shop to New City, Actar, Barcelona, 2006, ISBN 978-8495951878
  • M. Jeffrey Hardwick, Mall Maker: Victor Gruen, Architect of an American Dream, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003, ISBN 978-0812237627

External links


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Architecture and Landscaping. A Dictionary of Architecture and Landscape Architecture. Copyright © 1999, 2006 by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.  Read more
Columbia Encyclopedia. The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition Copyright © 2003, Columbia University Press. Licensed from Columbia University Press. All rights reserved. www.cc.columbia.edu/cu/cup/.  Read more
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