Victor Gruen

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Victor David Gruen, born Viktor David Grünbaum^[1] (July 18, 1903 - February 14, 1980), was an Austrian-born commercial architect.

Gruen was born in Vienna and 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. At that time he came to know Felix Slavik, the future mayor of Vienna, and they became friends. When Germany took over Austria in 1938 he emigrated to the United States. Short and stout, he landed "with an architect's degree, eight dollars, and no English."^{[citation needed]}

He is best known for one of the first American shopping malls, Southdale Mall, an 800,000 square-foot mall, which he designed for the owners of Dayton Department stores. Gruen was also the principal architect for a luxury housing development built on the 48 acre site of Boston, Massachusetts' former West End neighborhood. The first of several Gruen towers and plazas was completed in 1962. This development, known as CharlesRiver Park is regarded by many as a dramatically ruthless re-imagining of a former immigrant tenement neighborhood (Gans, O'Conner, The Hub).

Gruen designed Northland Mall, an open air shopping mall near Detroit in 1954. Then he designed Southdale Mall, the first enclosed shopping mall in the country in Edina, Minnesota. Opening in 1956, Southdale was meant as the kernel of a full-fledged community. The mall was commercially successful, but the original design was never fully-realized, as the intended apartment buildings, schools, medical facilities, park and lake were not built. He also built Greengate Mall in Greensburg, Pennsylvania, in the 1960s. Gruen designed Lakehurst Mall in 1971 for Waukegan, IL. Despite Gruen's efforts in the United States, in 1978, two years before his death in a country house outside Vienna, Gruen disavowed other shopping mall developments as having "bastardized" his idea.

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^ http://www.infoplease.com/ce6/people/A0932969.html retrieved Jun 11, 2008

Alex Wall, Victor Gruen: From Urban Shop to New City, Actar, Barcelona, 2006, ISBN 978-8495951878
M. Jeffrey Hardwick, Mall Maker: Victor Gruen, Architect of an American Dream, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003, ISBN 978-0812237627