- Victor Gruen
Victor David Gruen, born Viktor David Grünbaum [http://www.infoplease.com/ce6/people/A0932969.html retrieved Jun 11, 2008] (
July 18 ,1903 -February 14 ,1980 ), was anAustria n-born commercial architect.Gruen was born in
Vienna and studied architecture at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts. A committedsocialist , from 1926 until 1934 he ran the "political cabaret at theNaschmarkt "-theatre. At that time he came to know Felix Slavik, the future mayor of Vienna, and they became friends. WhenGermany 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."Fact|date=September 2007After the war, he designed the first suburban open-air shopping facility called Northland Mall near
Detroit in 1954. After the success of the first project, he designed his best known work for the owners of Dayton Department stores, the convert|800000|sqft|m2|sing=on Southdale Mall, the first enclosed shopping mall in the country inEdina, 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.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 also built
Greengate Mall inGreensburg, Pennsylvania , in the 1960s. He designedLakehurst Mall in 1971 forWaukegan, 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.ee also
*
Gefinor Tower (Beirut, Lebanon) [http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=1&categ_id=1&article_id=93587]
*Gruen transfer
*Midtown Plaza (Rochester)
*South Coast Plaza
*Fox Plaza*
Randhurst Mall
*Twelve Oaks Mall
*Lakehurst Mall
*Northland Center References
* 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 978-0812237627External links
* [http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?040315fa_fact1 "The New Yorker" on the Gruen biography, "Mall Maker".]
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