Victor Gruen: Architect of the American Dream - Mall Maker & Urban Visionary | Explore the History of Shopping Malls & Modern Retail Spaces
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Victor Gruen: Architect of the American Dream - Mall Maker & Urban Visionary | Explore the History of Shopping Malls & Modern Retail Spaces
$11.42
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Description
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.
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I admit that the purchase of this kindlebook that is Mall Maker: Victor Gruen Architect of An American Dream by M Jeffrey Hardwick is indirectly influenced by a multiple number of factors. One of the factors; even before I had a strange sleeptime dream around the December 2017/January 2018 timeframe where I was socializing with multiple friends inside a futuristic version of the Pentagon City mall (in Arlington Virginia) that appeared to look like some mall around 90 to 100 years into the future, and I always believed that multiple malls across America are going to be around for many more years regardless of how long some malls stay open. Additionally, the area that I currently reside in puts my husband and I in easy proximity to multiple malls because of the excellent public transportation options within the metropolitan Washington D.C. area; Westfield Wheaton Mall in Wheaton Maryland, Beltway Plaza Mall in Greenbelt Maryland, The Mall At Prince George’s in Hyattsville Maryland, Westfield Montgomery Mall in Bethesda Maryland, Tyson’s Corner Center Mall in Tysons Virginia. Gruen was credited with designing multiple suburban shopping centers,Some of the intense multiple details in this kindlebook: Gruen was a Jewish refugee from Vienna Austria who escaped the occupation of Hitler in 1938,Gruen’s affiliation with urban renewal concepts, the success of the Kalamazoo mall inspired other cities across America to contemplate the mall idea,his connection with the Midtown Plaza Project,Victor Gruen’s company had been thriving in America for at least 17 years, after living in the United States for 30 years Gruen relocated back to Vienna Austria,a photo image of a pedestrian mall designed by Victor Gruen and Garrett Eckbo for Fresno California in 1968,Gruen made time to write some books during this career that are listed to include Centers for the Urban Environment-Shopping Towns USA-and the Heart of Our Cities,Victor Gruen is listed to have passed away by February 14 1980 less than a few years after he tried to get a mall built in a certain area overseas that was best with political unrest though he was acknowleged by other writers for his contributions to include Wolf Von Eckhardt and the Washington Post, and more.
