#victor gruen

[obsessedbyneon]

Prelude to Xmas post: The Rainbow Center Mall and Winter Garden, Niagara Falls, New York state.

Picture 1, 2, 3, 6-10: The winter garden was designed by (Victor) Gruen Associates in 1978 and it was completed in 1980.

Picture 4, 5: The adjacent mall was added a little while later. In later years, the winter garden became too costly due to an insulation issue and was scaled down. Niagara Falls on the American side slowly degraded as well, pulling the quality of the mall down.

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[germanpostwarmodern]

Commons Courthouse Center (1973) in Columbus, IN, USA, by Cesar Pelli & Victor Gruen Associates. Photo by Balthazar Korab.

[americaisdead]

albuquerque, new mexico. october 2023

© tag christof

[americaisdead]

sliced up Dillards with former interior mall entrance visible.  winrock mall, albuquerque, new mexico.  december 2021

© tag christof

[obsessedbyneon]

Pacific Design Center, Los Angeles, 1980. Designed by Cesar Pelli and Victor Gruen. Remember this one. I'll feature it more.

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[menandwomanofhistory]

Victor Gruen

[sheltiechicago]

Paul Rudolph, Lower Manhattan Expressway, 1967-1972. Images from Never Built New York, 2016. Courtesy of Metropolis Books

The City That Wasn't by Pierre Alexandre de Looz

Never Built New York, edited by Greg Goldin and Sam Lubell (Metropolis Books, 2016)

Victor Gruen, Welfare Island, 1961.

Robert Moses, Fifth Avenue Extension, 1955.

Charles Lamb, diagonal street plan, 1911.

[countesspetofi]

Experimental Prototype Community Of Tomorrow, anyone?

Americans love Disneyland because it’s a walkable city

[vintagelasvegas]

Joseph Magnin and Jackman’s, 3145 Las Vegas Blvd S. Architects and Interior Designers: Victor Gruen Associates.

Photos circa ‘63 and ‘70.

The store replaced the former Players Club, south of the Desert Inn, at what is now slightly south of Wynn main gate. The stores opened 8/30/57, the first standalone retail shopping on the Las Vegas Strip, and the only building in Las Vegas by Victor Gruen Associates.

“Since its smooth adobelike surfaces boasted almost no signs at all, the first impact was one of deafening silence … To some it looked like a mixture of early Pueblo and late Corbusier, with a dash of Picasso in its middle eye.” - New shape on Main Street. Architectural Forum the Magazine of Building 1957-12: Vol 107 Issue 6.

Closed and demolished in ‘83.

[manorpunk]

Maria Lorraine is the kinda gal who will read the story about how victor gruen the “father of the american shopping mall” denounced malls because they contributed to suburban sprawl and she’s like “no empire can ever recover from trusting an austrian”

[aropride]

Victor Gruen’s original detailed plan for the Southdale project - from the Minneapolis Star, June 17 1952

(ID: A floorplan showing a shopping center with a school, a church, a restaurant, a park and playground, a lake, a nursery, a fire station, a recreational bowling center, business/medical/professional/utility buildings, another park and playground, a service station, and a market. In the middle of this is the shopping center, with two large buildings for shopping and two similarly sized sections for parking. Surrounding all of this is plenty of residential areas within walking distance from each other and the other buildings.

Text in the top left:

“Here is a detailed plan of Southdale, 10-million-dollar, 500-acre shopping and residential project in the area of Sixty-sixth street and France avenue S. (See story Page One). The project puts the shopping center some 600 feet from the nearest public streets. The center's own street plan acts as buffer between residential and commercial areas. The shopping center is a cluster type. The major department store--a branch of The Dayton Company--forms a nucleus about which some 50 smaller stores are grouped”

End ID)

[aokozaki]

I hope Victor Gruen knows I forgive him for inventing the shopping mall. It's okay buddy, you realized your mistake. That takes courage.

[nickgerlich]

Mall Shook Up

Our recent discussions about the doom and gloom facing current movie theatre chains got me to thinking about other bastions of the past that are on equally unstable ground. And there is perhaps no more wobbly a relic of our past than the mighty enclosed shopping mall.

Before we dive in, let me make it clear that I do not think they are all going to curl up and die just yet. But let’s face it. When about three quarters—that’s a full 75%—of our inventory of malls did just that since the 1980s, you have to wonder about the long term viability of the concept. One analyst predicts that the current stable of 700 malls could be whittled down to 150 in a decade.

It is interesting to note that malls were originally conceived as gathering places. Architect Victor Gruen, who designed the first fully enclosed mall still in use today in Edina Minnesota—Southdale Center—envisioned a climate-controlled environment in which people could escape the elements and could congregate under one roof. And this included not just shopping, but also dining, socializing, and even entertaining.

He was right, even though he later came to loathe his creation. In some regards, he was Dr. Frankenstein in the modern era. Malls became such a part of our cultural fabric that they spawned countless TV and movie scenes, because that is where humanity was happening.

In spite of all the social aspects, from senior citizen mall walkers to angst-filled teens and even a few legitimate shoppers, our malls are now by and large becoming near ghost towns. To be fair, there are still some powerhouse malls that likely have enough Teflon to withstand even the most significant forces of change, but they are increasingly becoming a minority.

And what are those forces of change? Of course, we must put online shopping at the top, even though it still only accounts for about 15% of all retail sales. Yes, that percentage spikes during the winter holidays, but the reality is that people still shop in BAM stores.

But there are other forces, notably that curbside and delivery have found traction, and that when we do venture out, we rather like outward-facing shops with nearby parking. Any of the outdoor formats, from strip centers to lifestyle centers and freestanding, are found to be more appealing than the sterility of the airtight mall. We can park in front of our destination. That climate control came to be an albatross; people don’t mind the elements as much as we once thought.

Then there is the matter of time, something that we can never seem to find enough of to complete all of our daily tasks. Shopping malls were designed to be massive time sucks. But who has time to just go browsing? I know I don’t. I cross the threshold of our nearby mall once a year—at Christmas, of course—and with a very purposive list of places to go and things to buy. In. And. Out.

We must also consider mall owners, which are often REITs. As long as stores are turning a profit and occupancy remains high, then life is good. But when departures increase, and especially the time-honored anchor stores, things get tough. Ponder all of the square footage dedicated to indoor commons areas. That area alone could have been put to much better use were the whole complex reconfigured. It costs money to heat and cool such monstrosities.

Today, we are left with the $64,000 question of the century thus far: What to do with these things when they die? Demolition is an easy if painful answer (there go our teenage memories), allowing for a new developer to come in and essentially start from scratch. But we probably don’t need anymore churches that occupy unused retail (they’re on the decline as well). That leaves converting them into warehouses, fulfillment centers, cloud computing facilities, and, if someone is willing to risk some money, adapting the entire space into a new live/work/shop center, retaining some retail elements, but adding apartments, offices, and gyms.



There are variations on this, of course. Whenever I see a mall that has filled empty slots with services, gyms, and adventure spaces, I know I am looking at a dying mall. This is desperation.  The new adventure space at Amarillo’s Westgate Mall is a shining example.

Even though I am not at all a mall shopper these days, I shake my head each time I hear of a mall’s demise. The mall in which I grew up—Dixie Square in Harvey Illinois—was one of the first to die. It shuttered in 1978, and was rented out to film a chase scene in The Blues Brothers movie that came out in 1980. I returned to the abandoned mall in 2010 to photograph it; finally, in 2012 it was demolished.

Poof. Gone. And yet I know there is a small part of my soul on that land.

I have to side with Mr. Gruen on this. He created a monster, and while that monster has some good attributes, it altered the retail landscape. Those effects may never be resolved completely. And that’s a movie I don’t want to watch more than once.

Dr “I Malled Out“ Gerlich

Audio Blog

[genderbendingavatar]

Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, the guy who proposed the idea of the guillotine.

And Victor Gruen, the inventor of malls.

[big-shmeebus]

The inventor of the shopping mall, Victor Gruen had this to say about his creation: