Victor Gruen: Visionary Urban Designer

In 2018, one wonders how the Austrian architect Victor Gruen would approach the current state of retail shopping, and how he would use design thinking to solve problems now experienced by brick and mortar stores due to the ever-expanding online shopping universe. That and other questions were addressed at the Victor Gruen: Visionary Urban Designer, a recent event hosted by The Minnesota Design Center.  Gruen (1930-1980) revolutionized the retail landscape when he designed Southdale Center in Edina, Minnesota. Southdale, the first fully enclosed, climate controlled shopping mall in the United States, opened in 1956 to great fanfare and was developed by the forward-thinking Dayton Department Store Company. 

The Victor Gruen: Visionary Urban Designer featured an open discussion with MDC director Thomas Fisher, Viennese architect Judith Eiblmayer, Viennese sociologist and cultural critic Anette Baldauf, and architect Alan Bruton, who investigated Gruen’s impact on 20^th century design. The most radical question addressed, however, was “What would Gruen do in a radically changing, 21^st century retail landscape?”

As originally conceived by Gruen, Southdale was to include housing, schools, medical facilities and community assets such as parks and play areas for children, most of which was never realized. (Currently, housing is being developed at the outer boundaries of Southdale.) Gruen went on to design other shopping centers in the Twin Cities and across the country. So widespread was his design vision, that he became known as the “Father of the Shopping Mall,” a label he later vehemently rejected. His original retail design concept was utopian - his communal spaces would bring people together and serve their needs. Gruen never intended his vision to produce vast acreage of asphalt parking lots or structures devoted solely to the cult of shopping. When Frank Lloyd Wright visited in 1956, his distaste for the entire Center was widely reported.

            The “What would Gruen do?” discussion continued after the MDC event by email when Baldauf wrote to me, “I think, considering Gruen’s psychodynamic, he would locate the center of power, as he always did, and pitch what seems today an outrageous idea but will soon reveal itself as an appropriate mode of survival: He might call up Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, and ask him out for lunch. There Gruen would remind Cook of his last keynote speech, praising Apple stores as the new town squares of America. Gruen might assert that he is happy to see Apple following his legacy, taking responsibility for the public good. But he would remind Cook to go beyond semiotics, to reinvent Apple and provide public services like open libraries, a tuition-free university and last, but not least, a living wage.” Provocative food for thought.

Bruton agreed with Baldauf, writing “I also think he would be heartened by the sense of urban activism in which ordinary citizens increasingly engage, and their increasing desire for more dense and multi-programed, urban re-developments in our hollowed-out downtowns, as well as in his denatured suburban malls. So, perhaps, Gruen would become something of a populist leader in the revitalization of the American mall as multi-use civic centers, again.” 

            The MDC Gruen event also included a screening of the documentary film The Gruen Effect: Victor Gruen and the Shopping Mall, written and directed by Baldauf, and Katarina Weingartner and, in which Bruton performs as the protagonist. (Here’s the trailer) https://vimeo.com/47459551

Baldauf also signed her book Shopping Town: Designing the City in Suburban America, a fascinating read, part memoir and part design philosophy, published by Minnesota Press 2017. https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/shopping-town

Mason Riddle is a MDC Communications consultant, and writer on the visual arts, architecture and design.