Victor Gruen and the Southdale Shopping Mall - Test 5

C1 Advanced · Gapped Text · C1 Advanced Trainer 2, Cambridge University Press

You are going to read an article about an architect, called Victor Gruen, who designed one of the first shopping malls in the USA. Six paragraphs have been removed from the article. Choose from the paragraphs A–G the one which fits each gap (1–6). There is one extra paragraph which you do not need to use.

Victor Gruen and the Southdale shopping mall

By then, the concept had some precedents around America. These included the Northgate Mall in Seattle, which opened in 1950, Valley Fair Mall in Appleton, Wisconsin, which opened in 1954, and Gruen’s own Northland Mall outside Detroit.

Despite this, when the renowned architect Frank Lloyd Wright visited Southdale, he was sceptical. He believed that Gruen’s notion of moving ‘downtown’ to the suburbs was unrealistic. Victor Gruen’s real aim, however, was to build a new kind of city, not just a shopping centre, and he later claimed that his conception of the shopping mall never came into being.

Those social concerns were somewhat at odds with Gruen’s own. He was interested in creating not just a ‘gigantic shopping machine’, but a community centre where, free from ‘the terror of the automobile’, people could stroll, congregate, debate and enjoy the human experience.

Unfortunately, Gruen’s entry, with its full enclosure and lack of a central square, struck even the most forward-thinking judges as a bit much. So Gruen went back to the drawing board.

Gruen would eventually criticise, even disown, this form that the US shopping mall took. Local residents, however, loved Southdale, and across the country, subsequent generations growing up far from a genuine city centre turned to places like Southdale for the closest thing to an urban experience they could find.

The writer James Lileks says of that early Southdale aesthetic: ‘You have no idea what an innovation it was in the 1950s; there wasn’t any place where you could sit “outside” in your shirt-sleeves in the middle of winter’ – least of all in a place where it gets as cold as it does in Minneapolis.

This was Gruen’s opportunity to realise his long-imagined vision of an indoor city centre that would import the urbanity of his native Vienna into his fast-growing adopted homeland. Southdale itself was constructed. Nothing else went as he’d envisaged, however, and by the 1970s, Gruen had returned to Austria, having concluded that he’d created a monster.

A somewhat extreme view, perhaps, but it’s important to understand the historical background. When Gruen first came up with the concept of the shopping mall, it seemed very radical. He first publicly submitted such a design in 1943 to a competition run by an architectural magazine, which had called upon architects to imagine the city of the future.

The next decade saw a shift in thinking. The 1952 commission that brought the Southdale Center into the world came from the Dayton family, a name synonymous with department stores in 1950s Minneapolis. They wanted a shopping centre to house a new store planned for the growing suburb of Edina. When it opened in 1956, Southdale contained that new branch of Dayton’s, another large department store, and space for more than 70 smaller shops in between.

But where the open-air design of those projects left them exposed to the elements, Southdale sealed off the outside environment in order to better create its own world within. Southdale’s vast, blank walls turned their backs to the street, enclosing stores, cafés, pedestrian boulevards and a courtyard, through whose skylight the sun shone on a fishpond, foliage and a centrepiece cage filled with songbirds. But the utter controllability of the enclosed shopping mall had to do with much more than the climate. It both appealed to Gruen’s design philosophy and played straight into the fears of many Americans. They didn’t just want protection from the heat, rain, snow and traffic encountered downtown; they also wanted protection from the people encountered there.

To this end, he designed Southdale as one element of a masterplan, including hundreds of hectares of residential, commercial, medical, office and mixed-use projects around a lake and public park. The developers, however, ignored most of this wider vision and, instead, set the precedent for all the huge, uninspiring-looking malls surrounded by enormous car parks – 1,500 of which appeared across America in the half-century after Southdale’s unveiling.

Hence the nostalgia that often accompanies the 21st century’s desertions, or even demolitions, of some of the United States’ enclosed malls. But suburban Americans now have a host of revitalised genuine downtowns to choose from, as well as a new wave of high-design, urban-flavoured, outward-looking shopping malls. Time has moved on for the mall.

According to its critics, the shopping mall is central to the mindless, car-bound consumerism of suburban USA. Yet Southdale Center, the first fully enclosed, climate-controlled mall from which so many other malls descend, came from the mind of an anti-car European idealist. In 1938, Victor Gruen arrived in America from Vienna in Austria with high architectural aims. He soon launched a career designing storefronts in New York City, but in 1952 he was commissioned to design something else entirely: a shopping centre 15 kilometres outside the city of Minneapolis. ___ A somewhat extreme view, perhaps, but it’s important to understand the historical background. When Gruen first came up with the concept of the shopping mall, it seemed very radical. He first publicly submitted such a design in 1943 to a competition run by an architectural magazine, which had called upon architects to imagine the city of the future. ___ The next decade saw a shift in thinking. The 1952 commission that brought the Southdale Center into the world came from the Dayton family, a name synonymous with department stores in 1950s Minneapolis. They wanted a shopping centre to house a new store planned for the growing suburb of Edina. When it opened in 1956, Southdale contained that new branch of Dayton’s, another large department store, and space for more than 70 smaller shops in between. ___ But where the open-air design of those projects left them exposed to the elements, Southdale sealed off the outside environment in order to better create its own world within. Southdale’s vast, blank walls turned their backs to the street, enclosing stores, cafés, pedestrian boulevards and a courtyard, through whose skylight the sun shone on a fishpond, foliage and a centrepiece cage filled with songbirds. ___ But the utter controllability of the enclosed shopping mall had to do with much more than the climate. It both appealed to Gruen’s design philosophy and played straight into the fears of many Americans. They didn’t just want protection from the heat, rain, snow and traffic encountered downtown; they also wanted protection from the people encountered there. ___ To this end, he designed Southdale as one element of a masterplan, including hundreds of hectares of residential, commercial, medical, office and mixed-use projects around a lake and public park. The developers, however, ignored most of this wider vision and, instead, set the precedent for all the huge, uninspiring-looking malls surrounded by enormous car parks – 1,500 of which appeared across America in the half-century after Southdale’s unveiling. ___ Hence the nostalgia that often accompanies the 21st century’s desertions, or even demolitions, of some of the United States’ enclosed malls. But suburban Americans now have a host of revitalised genuine downtowns to choose from, as well as a new wave of high-design, urban-flavoured, outward-looking shopping malls. Time has moved on for the mall.

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