Mall Maker

Victor Gruen, Architect of an American Dream

M. Jeffrey Hardwick

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780812292992
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture Essays & Monographs

The shopping mall is both the most visible and the most contentious symbol of American prosperity. Despite their convenience, malls are routinely criticized for representing much that is wrong in America—sprawl, conspicuous consumption, the loss of regional character, and the decline of Mom and Pop stores. So ubiquitous are malls that most people would be suprised to learn that they are the brainchild of a single person, architect Victor Gruen.An immigrant from Austria who fled the Nazis in 1938, Gruen based his idea for the mall on an idealized America: the dream of concentrated shops that would benefit the businessperson as well as the consumer and that would foster a sense of shared community. Modernist Philip Johnson applauded Gruen for creating a true civic art and architecture that enriched Americans' daily lives, and for decades he received praise from luminaries such as Lewis Mumford, Winthrop Rockefeller, and Lady Bird Johnson. Yet, in the end, Gruen returned to Europe, thoroughly disillusioned with his American dream.In Mall Maker, the first biography of this visionary spirit, M. Jeffrey Hardwick relates Gruen's successes and failures—his work at the 1939 World's Fair, his makeover of New York's Fifth Avenue boutiques, his rejected plans for reworking entire communities, such as Fort Worth, Texas, and his crowning achievement, the enclosed shopping mall. Throughout Hardwick illuminates the dramatic shifts in American culture during the mid-twentieth century, notably the rise of suburbia and automobiles, the death of downtown, and the effect these changes had on American life. Gruen championed the redesign of suburbs and cities through giant shopping malls, earnestly believing that he was promoting an American ideal, the ability to build a community. Yet, as malls began covering the landscape and downtowns became more depressed, Gruen became painfully aware that his dream of overcoming social problems through architecture and commerce was slipping away. By the tumultuous year of 1968, it had disappeared.Victor Gruen made America depend upon its shopping malls. While they did not provide an invigorated sense of community as he had hoped, they are enduring monuments to the lure of consumer culture.

CHAPTER ONE

Escaping from Vienna to Fifth Avenue

You must make this window-shopper push your door open and make him take a step, the one step, which changes him from a window-shopper into a customer. A good store front tries to make his step as easy as possible for him, and tries not to let him even notice that he takes such an important step.

—Victor Gruen, 1941

Seeing is selling.

—Libbey-Owens-Ford Glass Company, 1941

“A good storefront is one of your best salesmen,” designer Victor Gruen once informed merchants. “On its dignity and good taste people will base their opinions of your entire business.” Snazzy displays, he promised, could stop a person in his tracks and transform a mere passerby into a breathless customer. Gruen, barely a year in America, devoted much time to speculating about how best to fashion “sales appeal.” Strategic lighting, neon signs, show windows, glass facades, and ingenious floor plans could transform an ordinary store into what Gruen sensationally called “a machine for selling.” He wholeheartedly believed in his own skill at creating irresistible spaces and goods. These fabulous environments, Gruen promised, would excite, persuade, and ultimately control consumers’ emotions, responses, and pocketbooks. Later this consuming fever would be referred to as the Gruen Effect, a tribute to Gruen’s persuasive retail theories.¹

At first glance, Victor Gruen—a Viennese Jewish refugee, named Gruenbaum until 1941—seems an unlikely protagonist for the triumph of a new style for American retailing. Yet his initial rise in retail circles was meteoric. Within two years of arriving in New York, he had designed exhibitions for the 1939 World’s Fair, helped produce two Broadway plays, and written magazine articles on modern store design. Gruen offered more than advice—he also put his theories into practice. Beginning with few American contacts, Gruen capitalized on his new designs for two high-profile Fifth Avenue boutiques, created a shockingly new retail experience, and helped usher in a new era of retailing that would spread far beyond Manhattan’s avenues. And as Gruen pulled American retailing in a new direction, he drew on his past experiences of living and working in Vienna.

Gruen had not wanted to move to New York. He had loved his life in Vienna. “[I] never really left Vienna . . . it was a haven,” he later remembered. For thirty-five years he had lived in the vibrant Austrian city on the Danube, enjoying successes in theater and architecture, an active political life, and a rich social life. However, when Hitler seized power in March 1938, Gruen, like other Viennese Jews, had few options.²

Victor Gruenbaum was born in 1903, the only son of a “typical Viennese liberal family” with a “well-staffed household.” His father worked as a lawyer for theatrical clients. Adolf Gruenbaum also had a bit of the showman in him and was a popular lecturer in Viennese social clubs.³ The Gruenbaum family lived in Vienna’s Central District I in the heart of old Vienna. Turn-of-the-century Vienna was the birthplace of modernism. The city was famous for the art of Gustav Klimt and Oskar Kokoschka, the music of Gustav Mahler and Arnold Schoenberg. Modern psychoanalysis, with Sigmund Freud, Wilhelm Reich, and the younger Erik Erikson, had been developed in Vienna. The group of writers known as Young Vienna—including Arthur Schnitzler, Stefan Zweig, and Robert Musil—also explored the mores of middle-class Viennese. In architecture, modernists like Josef Hoffman, Adolf Loos, and Otto Wagner revolutionized the design of houses, stores, and public buildings in Vienna by combining sleek ornamentation and modern materials. At the craft guild and retail store Wiener Werkstatte, modernists also designed a new kind of decorative arts.

Gruen grew up in the dying embers of this vibrant aesthetic life. By the time he was a young man, Viennese citizens had turned toward more political activities, though a new generation did continue to invent new aesthetic forms to better people’s lives.⁴ In the midst of coffeehouses, theaters, restaurants, stores, hotels, and apartments, Gruen believed he was living in Europe’s “center of intellectual and cultural life.”⁵ In 1917 he graduated from the prestigious Realgymnasium in central Vienna and in keeping with his generation and circumstances immediately began to pursue an advanced degree. He concentrated on architecture at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts,⁶ where modernist Peter Behrens, famous for his machine-inspired buildings in Berlin, taught. Gruen quickly developed a strong interest in Vienna’s most famous turn-of-the-century modernist architect, Adolph Loos. Loos represented for Gruen the perfect blend of modernism and commitment to architectural ornament through using attractive materials.

In 1918 Gruen’s father died suddenly and the young student left school to support his mother and sister. As his personal life was thrown into disarray, so was his beloved Vienna. After the end of World War I, the Austro-Hungarian Empire collapsed. Vienna, as Austria’s capital city, felt the reverberations of this swift decline. Thousands of desperate refugees from Eastern Europe filled the city. Unemployment skyrocketed, and adequate housing was in short supply. The Viennese endured “chaotic social and economic conditions . . . followed [by] years of hunger and suffering,” Gruen later recalled.⁷ He was luckier than most, finding employment with his godfather’s architectural and construction firm, Melcher and Steiner. He worked there for eight long years, feeling “little satisfaction” from the projects. As a young man still in his twenties, Gruen found architecture too “practical,” especially for Vienna’s bleak times. To defeat “the basic sadness of this time,” he poured his energies into two other outlets: the cabaret theater and Socialist politics. Both interests remained with him throughout his life. He would always play showman and idealist, entertainer and reformer, sometimes on a grand scale.

As a child, Gruen had accompanied his father to rehearsals of plays and musical comedies, “letting theatrical life of Vienna soak into my bones.”⁸ Working in the architectural firm by day, Gruen performed in Vienna’s coffeehouses by night. His short performances, a vaudeville mix of music, slapstick, social critique, and drama, offered something for everyone. Gruen’s passion for theater soon combined with his commitment to Socialism, and he devoted his energies to working on Politisches Kabarett, a theater group that staged overtly political and controversial one-act skits. ⁹ Nothing escaped the criticism of the Politisches Kabarett. “I was in the thick of the revolutionary movement—acting and writing social commentaries for the little theaters, very anti-Hitler, anti-Dolfuss, anti-clerical,” Gruen nostalgically recalled.¹⁰ The acts were also famous for skewering the mores of the Viennese bourgeois. Most of all, the plays, as much as their staging in coffeehouses, created an intense relationship between actors and audience. Gruen adored this sense of the cabaret as a gathering place for the liberal Viennese community. For Gruen, there existed no distinct line between educating people about Socialist politics and entertaining them with jokes or songs—and he would also tread this ambiguous line in his later architectural work.¹¹

Gruen continued to work for the architectural firm and even earned his Austrian architectural license, but his passions remained elsewhere. In one particular play, Gruen voiced his discomfort with the architectural profession. Through a back-and-forth dialogue between an architect and a government official, he satirically portrayed the architect’s idealism being stifled by codes and regulations.¹² Architecture seemed too practical for this outgoing, idealistic Socialist. At the cabaret, Gruen saw more immediate results for Socialism and himself by entertaining people.

Gruen’s identity as a socialist was much stronger than his identity as a Jew. Though he had grown up in a decidedly Jewish part of Vienna, and nearly half his high school class had been Jewish, Gruen nevertheless remembered receiving “severe beatings by the other students” because he was a Jew.¹³ Like many of his generation, he had little use for religion. He was more committed to secular causes than religious ones. “Victor was much more of a Viennese than a Jew,” one architectural partner later explained.¹⁴ Decades later, Gruen tallied and ranked his various identities throughout his life: “adorer of the female, Socialist, humanist, environmentalist, architect, businessman, philosopher.” Jew was not among them. However, being Jewish led Gruen to Socialism. The rise of Socialism in Vienna was strongly connected to urban Jews; or rather, Jews in Vienna were much more likely to be Socialists than their Protestant neighbors. One historian of Vienna estimates that three-quarters of all Viennese Jews regularly voted with the Socialist party.¹⁵ In this respect, Gruen was not unique.

His interest in Socialism began while he was still a teenager. At the age of thirteen, he joined a scout troop of “budding socialists with red scarves.” He remembered the group as “increasingly political” and “consciously anti-monarchist.” On one occasion, the troop refused to parade in front of Kaiser Karl, Austria’s ruler.¹⁶ Gruen’s commitment to Socialism lasted well beyond his school days. He proudly remembered himself as having been a passionate Socialist up until 1938, and he and his first wife, Lizzie Kardos, were “staunch comrades in the Socialist movement.” Gruen met and fell in love with Lizzie through their involvement with the theater. They were married in 1930, celebrating with a costume party with theater friends and members of the Social Democratic Party.¹⁷

To uplift the working class, Viennese Socialists pursued concrete civic improvements, and adequate housing became the party’s rallying cry. From 1919, when the Socialists won citywide elections, to 1934, when the Austro-fascists seized the city government, Socialists constructed housing for 20,000 residents. That was one-tenth of the city’s residential property. One of Gruen’s early assignments for Melcher and Steiner was the construction of a municipal housing project, and he soon assumed responsibility for managing the entire project because his overweight supervisor could not climb the building’s stairs. Caught up in the Austro-Marxist building boom, Gruen also proposed a reform-minded architectural project of his own. In 1925 Gruen and two former art students (a later architectural partner, Rudi Baumfeld, and Ralph Langer) entered a competition to design one of the government’s apartment buildings. The team received third prize. Called “people’s palaces,” these were apartment buildings on a monumental scale. With hundreds of dwelling units for individual families, the buildings also stressed communal spaces. With kitchens, bathhouses, dining rooms, and schoolrooms, the Socialist-built apartments were designed both to house people and to unite them. This was Gruen’s sole project for the Socialist city government; the rest were commercial ventures.

Viennese Socialists placed great faith in large-scale planning efforts, pursuing what one writer remembered as “the human engineering needed to create the egalitarian society of the socialist dream.”¹⁸ The Socialists’ bedrock belief was in an improved environment that could uplift the working class. Historian Steven Beller characterizes the Socialists’ project as “creating an enclosed and protected living framework in which the worker family could be assisted to a higher standard of civilization and new humanity.”¹⁹ The Viennese Socialists’ belief in an environment’s power to determine people’s social, cultural, and political character would eventually become central to Gruen’s American architecture, although in a vastly different realization. Throughout his career, Gruen sought to build his version of a better future, economically and socially, through a reform of cities’ physical environment.

When the Socialists were removed from power in the violent battles of 1934, the proto-Fascist government cracked down on Socialism and closed the cabaret. So Gruen channeled his energy into architecture. With his wife Lizzie’s help, he redecorated his family’s flat to make space for his own architectural firm. From 1934 to 1936, Gruen undertook apartment renovations and interior design. He later claimed to have renovated as many as five hundred apartments. After 1936, he focused on more public architectural expressions, and soon landed retail clients in Vienna’s posh First District. Over two years, Gruen designed seven stores for Viennese merchants. One London review of his design for Bristol’s Parfumerie for the elegant Ringstrasse praised Gruen’s work as “one of the most modern and interesting shops in Vienna.” “Attractive shops” for “Vienna’s most exclusive shopping district,” was how one American publication summed up the designer’s Viennese retail designs. Gruen’s store designs played with innovative materials and lighting. For Bristol’s, Gruen placed mirrors on three walls and the ceiling to create the illusion of a more spacious interior.²⁰ Little did the enthusiastic reviewers realize that Gruen’s new retail career would soon end in Vienna.

FIGURE 1. Two of Gruen’s Vienna store designs. From Talbot Hamlin, “Some Restaurants and Recent Shops,” Pencil Points 20 (August 1939).

On March 12, 1938, Austria invited Hitler across the border. Viennese Fas...