Description
The man who invented the shopping mall — and spent his life regretting what it became. Victor Gruen, the Viennese architect who fled the 1938 Anschluss for America with little more than his drafting tools, designed Southdale Center in Minnesota — the first fully enclosed shopping mall — and became the most influential retail architect of the twentieth century. Shopping Town, his memoir and urbanist manifesto, finally appears in English in this University of Minnesota Press edition.
Edited by Anette Baldauf, the book opens with Gruen’s flight from Vienna and follows his American career: the grand vision of malls as European-style town centers — civic, walkable, humane — and his growing dismay as developers stripped the idea down to parking lots and sprawl. It is the autobiography of an idea, and of its betrayal by the very industry it created.
Fascinating for anyone interested in cities, architecture, or how America got its landscape. The mall’s inventor tells all — including what went wrong.
Shopping Town: Designing the City in Suburban America
Introduction to Shopping Town by Victor Gruen
Shopping Town: Designing the City in Suburban America is the long-overdue English-language edition of the memoir and urbanist manifesto of Victor Gruen, one of the twentieth century’s most influential architects and the man regarded as the father of the shopping mall. Edited by Anette Baldauf and published by the University of Minnesota Press in 2017, the book opens in Vienna in 1938 with the Anschluss, the turning point in Gruen’s life, as he fled to America.
The Man Who Invented the Mall
Gruen designed Southdale Center in Minnesota, the first fully enclosed shopping mall, and went on to shape suburban America. But Shopping Town reveals a visionary who dreamed of much more than shopping: pedestrian-friendly city centers, vibrant public spaces, and humane urban design. With wit and candor, Gruen reflects on his career, his ideals, and his famous disillusionment with what the mall became.
Why This Book Matters
Essential reading for architects, urban planners, and anyone curious about how America was built, Shopping Town is both a personal memoir and a provocative theory of the city. A fascinating portrait of a brilliant, contradictory man whose ideas still shape the places we live.
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