Victor Gruen

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Victor David Gruen (born Gruenbaum, July 18, 1903, Vienna – February 14, 1980 Vienna), was an Austrian-born commercial architect who emigrated to the United States in 1938. He is best known as the designer of Southdale mall, and the father of the modern American shopping mall.

Gruen was born an Austrian Jew. He grew up in Vienna, studying 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 (after the nazi-time) of Vienna, and they became friends, which turned out to be very positive for Vienna. When Germany took over Austria in 1938 he emigrated to the United States. He landed "with an architect's degree, eight dollars, and no English."

Gruen designed the influential Northland Center open air shopping mall near Detroit in 1954, as a response to changes in urban form dictated by the automobile in postwar America. It became a model for many others. He also designed the first fully-enclosed mall, Southdale Center in Edina, Minnesota, which opened in 1956. Southdale was meant as the kernel of a full-fledged community. The mall was commercially successful but the surrounding non-commercial activities did not take hold. Although Gruen was responsible for the ubiquitous double-level enclosed shopping mall form, and his firm designed literally dozens of edge-city enclosed malls in the US and dozens of the downtown pedestrian malls meant to compete with them, Gruen bitterly disavowed the repetitive nature of shopping mall designs across the country.

Timothy Mennel from the University of Minnesota on Gruen: "The postwar American shopping mall projects of Austrian émigré Victor Gruen aimed to create not merely ideal commercial zones but complete, insular communities that would serve as templates in the (re)construction of an ideal capitalist society. These utopian sites were shaped as much by cold war concerns as by capitalist dreams, and as a result, they came to highlight tensions between the imperatives of commerce (which made malls possible) and the cooperative ones at the root of much utopian thought. This is seen in a close study of Gruen’s "shopper’s paradise," Southdale—the first fully enclosed, temperature-controlled mall."