DREAMS AND REGRETS
REVIEWED BY KELLY COMRAS, FASLA
FROM THE JULY 2018 ISSUE OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE.
Victor D. Gruen (1903?1980) was one of the most influential architects of the 20th century, a powerful visionary who combined social criticism, persuasive charm, ambition, and talent. Known as the father of the shopping mall, he envisioned a cure for the banality of postwar American suburbia and neglected city centers that profoundly altered the landscape of postwar city development. He suggested ?shopping towns,? new community centers that would contain a rich mix of civic and commercial spaces and activities, and the introduction of pedestrian zones within the core of older city centers. Later in life, he criticized that his ideas had been co-opted by developers, commercialized by economic, political, and cultural forces beyond his control, which thereby emerged on the postwar landscape as an unintended archetype: the enclosed, inward-facing, single-purpose, multilevel, two-anchor-department-store shopping center. Gruen has left us with an impressive number of writings about his work (including the well-known The Heart of Our Cities), and two pertinent books have tackled appraisals of his work?Alex Wall?s Victor Gruen: From Urban Shop to New City (2005) and M. Jeffrey Hardwick?s Mall Maker: Victor Gruen, Architect of an American Dream (2004). But Anette Baldauf?s new translation from German of Gruen?s dictated memoirs, Shopping Town, presents us with the rare opportunity to rea...
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