https://d2ng68cf36kxsk.cloudfront.net/store/public/post/1276/post_images/Slide422.JPG">

When the fascists came to power in 1934, though atheist by persuasion, Grünbaum was classified Jew by race. The only commissions he was able to come by were Vienna storefronts. Then, on March 12, 1938, Hitler annexed Austria, and Grünbaum spent a long night feeding the stove with his plays and writings – “my past goes up in flames,” he lamented.¹⁸⁴ Many of the leaders of Austrian socialism had been Jews, and for the fascists, the socialist danger was a Jewish danger. Grünbaum was briefly jailed and his design firm seized. He fled to New York, where he became Victor Gruen.¹⁸⁵

Gruen’s first architectural jobs in the USA were to work on designs for the 1939 New York World’s Fair, then storefronts in the city. Soon after that, he started to work on architectural theory.

Just as the highly elaborated theories of Austro-Marxism had driven its political practice, in 1952 Gruen co-wrote an article “Shopping Centers: The New Building Type.” Then the most widely circulating architecture magazine in the United States, Progressive Architecture devoted almost a whole issue to the article. It was more like a manifesto, because no examples yet existed of the building type he announced. As in Red Vienna, practice was to follow theory.

Gruen’s starting point was critique: “the anarchistic wilderness of our cities,” where “millions of gasoline driven ‘spirits’ get into each other’s way and choke the highways, roads and parking areas,” and, with suburbanization, “the ring of blighted slum areas which surrounds so many of the downtown districts.” Beyond the city, there was a “vacuum created by the absence of social, cultural and civic crystallization points in our vast suburban areas.”¹⁸⁶

The solution was planning. The regional shopping center, “[t]his new architectural design concept, is … neither publicly owned nor completely controlled by one institution, … a conscious and conscientious co-operative effort.”¹⁸⁷ Gruen’s vision for the shopping center sounded rather like Viennese socialism.

With the advent of the large shopping center there will be a new outlet for that primary human instinct to mingle with other humans – to have social meetings, to relax together, to enjoy art, music, civic activities, the theater, films, good food, and entertainment in the company of others. What are the requisites to the fulfillment of this function of a social and cultural center?

First of all, to include, from the inception of the general plan, attributes which go beyond the commercial needs: auditoriums, lecture rooms, exhibit rooms, reading rooms, theaters, restaurants of many types, club rooms, community centers, libraries, children’s day nurseries, boy and girl scout dens.

Second, to take advantage of the existence of public areas – such as garden courts, malls, arcades, terraces, covered walkways – for relaxation and amusement. There will be greenhouses, play areas, band shells, outdoor theaters, outdoor fashion shows, miniature zoos, outdoor shows of painting and sculpture, flower shows, picnic grounds.

Third, to realize an architectural concept and treatment which offer variety without confusion, colorful appearance without garishness, gaiety without vulgarity; … an architectural treatment which, by the application of scientific design, eliminates what appears as an ugly rash on the body of our cities – the countless smoke stacks, telephone poles, power poles, dangling wires, air conditioning and ventilating ducts … The myriad warning signs, lamp posts, bus-stop signs, directional signs, hydrants, waste baskets, letter boxes – all must be redesigned, coordinated and brought into a disciplined pattern. Here, at last, is an opportunity for contemporary art to find a place as part of a new architectural concept. Here is space for sculptures, murals, fountains, mosaics on floors, and mosaics on walls.¹⁸⁸

Victor Gruen’s manifesto became a reality, at least in part, with his Northland Center outside of Detroit, opened in 1954, and after that the first fully indoor shopping center, Southdale Center in Edina, Minnesota, opened in 1956. Gruen went on to design many more, and today there are enclosed shopping malls in almost every city in the world.¹⁸⁹

Gruen was proposing a new spatial grammar, an historic compromise between the interests of the real estate developers, retailers, and the public. Cars would be quarantined on the outside. Walking one’s way along the arcades to the heart of the shopping center, an introverted multifunction urban square was to be found. Around this, arcades were stacked several stories high, indoor pedestrian streets with a range of stores reminiscent of the old main street. Open storefronts blurred the seemingly public outside spaces from the private commercial spaces of the stores. Escalators prompted people to ascend, then the necessity to circulate past other store fronts before descending – a maze-like perambulatory experience.¹⁹⁰

The mall is a quintessentially modern site for the forms of its engagement of differential interests – in this case, the interests of retailers and the interests of consumers. In the ultra-localized and effervescently short life of the commodity, this is the site of a defining moment in the complex interplay of use values and exchange values. Here, the social processes of production and distribution meet the imagined potentialities of use value to ignite the spark of exchange value. The mall is a place for the entanglement of differential meanings, a carefully designed amalgam of text, image, space, object, body, sound, and speech. “Metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties,” Karl Marx would say. We would say, the mysteries of transposition.^§AS2.3a

The roots of the mall are not as old as humanity, for First Peoples had no such things. But they are at least as old as the fairs and markets of slave and feudal societies. Though another market of sorts, the post-Gruen mall has its own, distinctively nuanced grammar. “Shopping,” we might write glibly on this page, reifying the experience as if it were objective, a concept forever. But if we parse the mall itself as an experience of multimodal meaning, we will uncover some of its depths, some of its historically-specific manifestations.

Here are just a few parts of this experience.

Text: carefully sized and placed signs, written in what Ron Scollon calls the “visual holophrastic language”¹⁹¹ of typography for the brands of stores, where the unit of meaning is as ideographic as a Chinese character. Gruen was fastidious about the regularity of signage in the mall. But there was not much text: Gruen advised how much was too much, what would become a distraction.

Image: posters in storefronts put fashions onto pictured models; places are portrayed where commodities can be put to use in life; directional icons; and navigation maps – mall owners feel they need to have these in deference to retailers, but they are mostly confusing, because the space is confusing by design, so purchasers can become lost in a trance of consumerism.¹⁹²

Space: This is a meticulously planned, holistically ordered space, a designerly escape from the chaos of the car-oriented cityscape, a sanctuary from fragmented ugliness of the capitalist city, an artificial utopia, hermetically sealed even from the natural vagaries of weather. People go there just to be there, and they shop more because they are there.¹⁹³ Wide open doors, or entirely open storefronts, blur the boundary between the notional street and the store, beckoning people across the threshold of the pseudo-public.

Object: the aromas wafting out of stores; the stuff you can handle at the entry to the store; or the typically high-touch stuff on the little stalls that emulate traditional markets, taking retail labor back to the medieval marketplace, except now, the latter-day feudal landlord extracts rent for the space of the stall.

Body: Shoppers see many stores at a glance across multiple levels in atriums, and their bodily perambulations across levels are at once easy (escalators) and circuitous (how the escalators are placed in relation to each other). “I don’t like to go to malls because I always get lost,” a woman told William Kowinski while he was documenting the mall experience, “and that’s embarrassing. I feel stupid. It makes me mad.”¹⁹⁴ But if there is stupidity, if she is bodily disoriented, this woman should not blame herself; her stupidity is by design. If she were to parse the processes of reification, she might come to realize that it is not her.

Sound: the barely noticeable piped music of an ideal moodscape; the audio of an event in the atrium drawing you to stop and watch.

Speech: As a mall worker checks the coats of customers for drops of forecast rain, they ask, “has it started yet?” With the absence of weather, says Kowinski wryly, comes an absence of civil liberties. The companies who own the mall not only have control over the weather; they also exercise control over speech. Private security guards regulate acceptable presence, and the mall owners determine who can speak publicly in the courtyards or set up tables for petitioning.¹⁹⁵ Some kinds of activism and politics are not good for shopping, and the mall owners determine which these are.¹⁹⁶ Non-commercial talk of a possible world outside of the mall rarely gets beyond the weather.

In these ways, the shopping mall is a space of total design, the result of fastidiously integrated social planning of Austro-Marxist proportions. But the interests at play are not the same. In Red Vienna the differentials were between the socialist theorists and the educable masses. In the shopping mall, the differences are between mall owners as proxies for tenant retailers, and shoppers. The mall owner’s program is to reify social experience in the immediate material practices of text, image, space, object, body, sound, and speech.

These reifications frame a social architecture of meaning, orchestrating the interplay of mall owner and shopper where deeper interests are more obvious to mall owner than to shopper, where meanings are obscured for shoppers in a pseudo-public space. The effect of the design is to regulate and control. The bottom line for the mall owner is profit, but the reifying game they play is social. The mall is a museum of nicely arranged use values. Prices are a nod to exchange value, but in the immediate experience of shopping, the deeper interplay of interests is mostly inscrutable.

In this play of differential interests, mall owners control the program. After all, their capital constructs the place; they determine its multimodal designs. There is never a question that a democracy of consumers might be involved in the design of a mall. In the negotiation of differential social interests, the mall becomes at best an appropriation, at worst a travesty of the principles of Red Vienna.

By these means, consumer agency is channeled by seemingly objective realities, as if this is all there is, and there can be no other way to be.

Gruen kept theorizing as he built. In 1960, a book, Shopping Towns USA: The Planning of Shopping Centers – “shopping centers have taken the characteristics of urban organisms serving a multitude of human needs and activities, thus justifying the designation: ‘shopping towns.’”¹⁹⁷ The subtitle of this book indicates that its focus is social planning in order to mitigate the worst excesses of freewheeling markets.

Then in 1973 another book, a plea to return to the values of urbanism in the context of environmental disaster and car-induced urban blight: Centers for the Urban Environment: Survival of the Cities: “In order to be meaningful, concern regarding any specific part of the human environment must be related to the wider horizons of settlements for human beings. It must be based on an awareness that environmental planning is the key to human survival on this planet.”¹⁹⁸

In this book, he created a notation for the design of a multifunctional center, where human functions in space met supporting structural and mechanical forms.

And finally, in 1978, just two years before he died, an article, “The Sad Story of Shopping Centers,” reprinting a speech he gave at the Conference of the International Council of Shopping Centres in London. There, he described them as “huge, specialized ghettos, … disastrous expressions of mono-function, … [built by] anonymous real-estate … speculators who just wanted to make a fast buck … ruinous for American cities … The environmental and humane ideas underlying … in the original centres … were completely forgotten. Only those features which had proved profitable were copied.”¹⁹⁹ This is probably not what the conference participants expected or wanted to hear.

And of the America where he started this trend, Gruen said it had become a place where “everybody is persuaded to buy what he doesn’t need with money he doesn’t own in order to impress people he actually can’t stand.”

At the end of his life, Gruen returned to live in Vienna, only to find to his dismay, a new wave of shopping malls stripping life from the city of his birth.²⁰⁰

---

¹⁸⁴ Victor Gruen, 1979 [2017], Shopping Town: Designing the City in Suburban America, translated by A. Bauldauf, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, p. 5.

¹⁸⁵ M. Jeffrey Hardwick, 2004, Mall Maker: Victor Gruen, Architect of an American Dream, Pittsburgh: University of Pennsylvania Press, pp. 8–17.

¹⁸⁶ Victor Gruen and Laurence P. Smith, 1952, “Shopping Centers: The New Building Type,” Progressive Architecture (June):67–109, pp. 70, 67–68.

¹⁸⁷ Ibid., p. 70.

¹⁸⁸ Ibid., pp. 68–69.

¹⁸⁹ Alex Wall, 2005, Victor Gruen: From Urban Shop to New City, Barcelona: Actar.

¹⁹⁰ David Smiley, 2013, Pedestrian Modern: Shopping and American Architecture, 1925–1956, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

¹⁹¹ Ron Scollon, 1999, “Multilingualism and Intellectual Property: Visual Holophrastic Discourse and the Commodity/Sign,” pp. 404–17 in Georgetown University Round Table on Languages and Linguistics, edited by J.E. Alatis and A.-H. Tan, Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.

¹⁹² Paco Underhill, 2004, The Call of the Mall, New York: Simon and Schuster, p. 43.

¹⁹³ William Severini Kowinski, 1985, The Malling of America: An inside Look at the Great Consumer Paradise, New York: William Morrow and Company, pp. 120–21.

¹⁹⁴ Ibid., p. 338.

¹⁹⁵ Ibid., pp. 344, 338, 356–57, 362.

¹⁹⁶ Paco Underhill, 2004, The Call of the Mall, New York: Simon and Schuster, p. 32; William H. Whyte, 1988, City: Rediscovering the Center, New York: Doubleday, pp. 208–10.

¹⁹⁷ Victor Gruen, 1960, Shopping Towns USA: The Planning of Shopping Centers, New York: Reinhold Publishing, p. 11.

¹⁹⁸ Victor Gruen, 1973, Centers for the Urban Environment: Survival of the Cities, New York: Van Norstrand Reinhold, p. 3.

¹⁹⁹ Victor Gruen, 1978, “The Sad Story of Shopping Centers,” Town and Country Planning 46(7–8):350–53, pp. 351–52.

²⁰⁰ M. Jeffrey Hardwick, 2004, Mall Maker: Victor Gruen, Architect of an American Dream, Pittsburgh: University of Pennsylvania Press, p. 218.

---

Kalantzis, Mary, and Bill Cope. 2020. Adding Sense: Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press. pp. 247–252. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108862059

Victor Gruen’s “Shopping Towns USA” §AS2.3c