Shopping Town: Designing the City in Suburban America

by Victor Gruen, Anette Baldauf (Editor & Translator)

Victor Gruen was one of the twentieth century’s most influential architects and is regarded as the father of the U.S. shopping mall. In spring 1979, less than a year before his death, he began reconstructing his life story. Now available in English for the first time, Shopping Town is the long overdue account of a man whose work fundamentally altered the course of city development. 

Shopping Town opens in Vienna in 1938 with the Anschluss—the turning point in Gruen’s life—as he narrowly escaped the Nazi regime. A few years later, in the suburbs of postwar America, the Jewish refugee sought to reproduce the vitality of Vienna’s city center and invented the commercial apparatus now known as the shopping mall. Gruen’s Southdale Mall in Edina, Minnesota, was the first fully enclosed shopping center in America. He then translated the concept to economically neglected city centers, setting the path for pedestrian zones and fighting passionately for an urban ideal without compromise. 

Highlighting Gruen’s sense of humor as well as reflections on the complex forces that sustained the postwar transformation of American cities, Shopping Town embeds Gruen’s experiences and perspectives in a wider social and political context while helping us understand his problematic place in American architectural culture. With afterwords by his son and daughter, Shopping Town closes with Anette Baldauf’s richly insightful essay on the legacy of Victor Gruen.

328 pages, Hardcover

Published May 30, 2017

About the author

Victor Gruen, born Viktor David Grünbaum, (July 18, 1903 – February 14, 1980), was an Austrian-born architect best known as a pioneer in the design of shopping malls in the United States. He is also noted for his urban revitalization proposals, described in his writings and applied in master plans such as for Fort Worth, Texas (1955), Kalamazoo, Michigan (1958) and Fresno, California (1965). An advocate of prioritizing pedestrians over cars in urban cores, he was also the designer of the first outdoor pedestrian mall in the United States, the Kalamazoo Mall.

Gruen was born on July 18, 1903, in a middle-class Jewish family in Vienna, Austria. He studied architecture at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts. A committed socialist, from 1926 until 1934 he ran the "political cabaret at the Naschmarkt"-theatre.

Reviews

[Morgan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Surprisingly fascinating autobiography of the "father of the shopping mall," though he would renounce that title and shopping malls in general (amen!) later in life. There are some short essays by his children, as well as an essay and preface by the book's translator. A fairly fast read, especially since there are a lot of pictures. I will admit to skimming some sections. Overall, this book exemplifies what I love most about what I do: learning all sorts of things I would never have thought to learn about.

[Mills College Library]

Biog G886g 2017