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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. Malls are so ubiquitous
that it would surprise most people 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.
M. Jeffrey Hardwick is an editor at Smithsonian
Books. He earned his Ph.D. degree in American studies from
Yale University.
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