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July 28, 2003
I've never been particularly fond of shopping malls. I felt trapped in them. I also intensely disliked the massive suburban ones, that were been built since the 1960s for the housing estates that were built far from the urban centre of the industrial city. I've more or less avoided the windowless warrens of chain stores that were scattered around a giant supermarket.
I have always preferred to do my shopping in markets where I could as the arcades in the inner city became a husk of their former selves and urban life atrophied.
So I was interested inthis piece about Victor Gruen, the Austrian architect who came up with idea of an enclosed shopping mall. It describes the design thinking behind shopping malls:
"As people left the cities for the suburbs of postwar America, what they missed was a central place for shopping, walking, meeting neighbors or just spending time. Highway strip malls were uninspired, dangerous and single-use. In designing the automobile-based environment, then, architects should restore some of the satisfactions of the old pedestrian city, with new climate control technologies, within the safe walls of a mall. "
Hence, the shopping center is one of the few new building types created in our times that provided a genuine and profitable alternative to downtown or strip shopping. The suburban malls elipsed the inner city, which pretty much died.
Victor Gruen has a dream. His innovative design envisioned the shopping mall to be a new town centre. It was to be a reinvention of the European public square. It would be the new centre in suburbia that would bring a vibrant community life to the motorized suburbs.
I never saw the dream realised myself.
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Like Gary, I hate indoor shopping malls. Apart from their car-centricity in location, however, it strikes me that the aesthetics and economics of the average suburban mall are not totally dissimilar to the network of enclosed arcades found in Melbourne’s CBD. Most of these arcades (like all malls) have a single owner, so making the central “street” area unambiguously enforceable as private property. Yet the central common zones in arcades are much closer to “real” streets than to their counterparts in malls – I wonder why.
Admittedly, a network of arcades (with each component having 10-30 shopfronts) does not have a single owner, so making a like-for-like comparison with a 100-500 shopfront typical mall problematic. Also, a network of arcades is interrupted by “real” streets, so negating much of the claustrophobia that seems to always come with malls.
A step towards solving the arcade paradox, if I may term it that, may lie in this Victor Gruen quote (from the Retail Traffic Magazine article link):
'Gruen also sought a balance between the architectural rigor of Modernism and the pragmatic realities of a competitive retail environment. Comparing it to the balance between federal and state governments, he wrote, “The overall character of the center must be one of corporate strength through the strength of individuals.”'
I don’t personally see, or feel, any sense of balance or restraint in shopping malls. Ironically, for a refugee from Nazism, Gruen’s legacy has come to have much in common with the coldness of the Nazi monumentalist (“corporate strength”) aesthetic.