The Gruen Effect

The U.S. gets a lot of hate for the creation of the “suburb” because they lack the intermediary space of leisure. If home is the primary place, work is a second place, people needed a third place to build community, hang out, and feel connected. Hence, the creation of the shopping mall. The mall was a compromise to the lack of community interaction.

The peak of shopping malls happened because it was the one place that people could go to escape the heat in the summer and the cold in the winter. Of course, people would want to go. But once climate-controlled areas became more readily available, the novelty of driving to a place just to be inside lost its appeal.

I think with Victor Guren being Austrian, didn’t plan for the shopping mall to become this “junkspace” that it has come to be known for and instead had imagined designing an environment with more than just shops. It was meant to be an indoor plaza that would serve as an island of connection in the middle of the suburban sprawl. It seemed like he was trying to emulate the Viennese city lifestyle of shopping and apply it to the American suburbs.

What was once a suburban pilgrimage site, we now have ominous, amorphous, boxy shape buildings. And although the exteriors of Gruen’s shopping centers are considered to be uniformly boring, the exteriors weren’t the point. It was the life and the atmosphere within the mall that became the center of the interaction of community that didn’t exist before.