- 1 The speech was partially published in Gruen V. (1978a), ‘The Sad Story of Shopping Centers’, Tow (...)
1In 1978, in a speech given in London at the Third Annual European Conference of the International Council of Shopping Centers,1 Victor Gruen (1903-1980) rejected the authorship of these ‘single function ghettos’ (Gruen, 1978a, p. 352) that shopping centers had become. Built in large numbers in a majority of Western countries, these ‘shopping machines’ generally betrayed the ideals and principles that had inspired them, such as Gruen had originally conceived them at least. He deplored the fact that the increase in the number of shopping centers had gone hand in hand with a decline in their quality, and that the ‘environmental and humane concepts’ behind the first experiments in this field had been completely forgotten (Gruen, 1978a, p. 351). He regretted that only the programmatic elements that stimulated commercial activity had been implemented and stated his conviction that ‘the shopping center in its conventional meaning has no future at all. Beyond that I feel that unmistakable signs of its downfall are already recognizable and will express themselves increasingly with every year that passes on’ (Gruen, 1978b, p. 2). This failure, as he saw it, was due to the change in the nature of the parties commissioning these commercial infrastructures: the ‘merchant princes’ (the owners of department stores) who had once supported and financed these projects were more often than not replaced by real estate developers, or even simply by investors concerned only with profitability.
- 2 Articles appeared regularly in Arts and architecture, Architectural Forum and Architectural reco (...)
- 3 Cf., for example, Marin J. (2017), ‘Les “malls” fantômes hantent les Etats-Unis’, Le Monde, 10/1 (...)
2Recognized as the father of the shopping center for more than twenty years, his expertise had been regularly solicited in many Western countries – Austria, Belgium, Italy, France and Switzerland for Europe, in addition to the United States – by department store managers, senior civil servants or the elected officials of large cities. As early as the 1950s, architectural magazines had been publishing images of this new typology that was the shopping center,2 and from 1960, many city officials, architects and planners, including European ones, owned a copy of Victor Gruen and Larry Smith’s Shopping Towns USA. The Planning of Shopping Centers (1960), which had become a genuine bestseller. Even today, Gruen’s name is frequently associated with these vast commercial infrastructures now called shopping malls. However, while his name is often cited in works analyzing the commercial dimension of these projects (Thil, 1966; Moncan, 2008; Koehl, 1990; Desse & al., 2008), the ideals Gruen defended remain somewhat overlooked in the majority of studies. The evolution of the vocabulary – from shopping center to shopping mall – attests to this, contributing to a misconception of what each of the two terms meant to Gruen. His work does not feature in the histories of twentieth-century architecture – at most, his name is found in footnotes – as architecture labeled as ‘commercial’ does not have good press, at least not when it was built in the twentieth century. One exception is the volume published by Rem Koolhaas and his team at Harvard: Harvard Design School guide to shopping (2001). We should also mention the book Shopping Towns Europe (2017) – echoing Shopping Towns USA – which invites us to consider Gruen’s influence in Europe and the transfers that may have taken place on either side of the Atlantic. Otherwise, the architecture of the shopping center is most often confused with the one of the hypermarket in some countries, and associated with the image of the low-quality ‘shoebox’ that pops up along highway ramps near urban centers (Péron, 2004). While Victor Gruen’s name is better known today than it was twenty years ago, this is partly due to the fact that many of these commercial infrastructures have gone bankrupt and are giving rise to a new kind of ruin in the twenty-first century,3 in the United States in particular. Asian countries differ in this respect, with vast shopping centers for luxury goods still being built today (Gasnier, Lemarchand, 2014).
3The aim of this paper is to put Victor Gruen’s thinking into context, clarifying what he meant by ‘shopping center’ and ‘shopping mall’. It also seeks to understand the nature of the difficulties Gruen encountered when he tried to transpose his ideas onto European soil, particularly in France. While Gruen’s work in the United States has already been studied in detail (Hardwick, 2004; Wall, 2005; Baldauf, 2017; Malherek, 2022), his European projects remain relatively unknown, due in part to the fact that they often did not have the same outcomes as the ones built across the Atlantic. Gruen had difficulty establishing himself as prime contractor on the old continent, despite opening a new office in Vienna (Austria) in 1967. He was generally commissioned as a consultant and the projects he worked on were constructed by others – when they were constructed at all – which did not help to make his European production particularly attractive to historians. In recent years, however, research has begun to reveal his influence on certain planning choices implemented in Europe, including in France, during the 1960s-1970s (Lechat, 2006; Feriel, 2022; Gosseye, 2017; Maumi, 2018-2020; Zuccaro Marchi, 2018). Nevertheless, a lot of further research is required to understand Gruen’s contributions at a time when Europe was embarking on the construction of the first shopping centers in the image of those built in the United States, and when new town construction programs were being launched in response to the demographic growth experienced during the boom years of the post-war period. Moreover, it is interesting to observe the discrepancy between the expectations of the clients – who solicited Gruen for his expertise on shopping centers – and what Gruen viewed as his mission: to ensure that European countries did not follow the same path as the United States, where downtowns had been ruined by the policy of promoting suburbanization and the development of shopping centers. There was a lesson to be learned from the American experience in Gruen’s view.
- 4 The research was made possible by a Paul Mellon Fellowship awarded by CASVA, National Gallery of (...)
- 5 Cf. Guide to the Victor Gruen Collection, Accession 5809.
4The analysis is based on research carried out in the Victor Gruen archive at the Library of Congress4 as well as on archives held at the American Heritage Center of the University of Wyoming.5 Further research was conducted in the archives of the City of Paris and La Défense.
5Victor Grünbaum was forced to leave Vienna (Austria) in 1938. Upon his arrival in New York, he joined the team working on the 1939 New York World’s Fair project and discovered the many technological advances being made in many fields. The World’s Fair immersed the Americans in an idealized vision of the city of the future. Futurama, Gruen later realized, prefigured the America of the 1950s. The store layouts he designed with architect Morris Ketchum were immediately noticed and the architectural firm founded with Elsie Krummeck, which specialized in shopfitting, quickly acquired a reputation throughout the United States. With many commissions coming from California, in 1941 they opened an office in Los Angles, the year in which Grünbaum changed his name to Gruen. Cyril Magnin, owner of the San Francisco department store of the same name, asked the firm to design new stores in Reno and San Mateo, and Walter Kirschner entrusted them with the design of the future branches of Grayson’s. Department stores were in full development at the time, and the momentum continued during World War II with the increase in the number of women customers, whose purchasing power became all the more important because they now represented an important workforce.
- 6 X being the year that would mark the end of the war.
- 7 The supermarket was treated separately, this project being entrusted to the New York architect J (...)
6In 1943, The Architectural Forum published the issue ‘New Buildings for 194X’6 presenting a variety of typologies that would find a place in any average city after the war. Gruen and Krummeck were tasked with imagining where commerce would take place once the war was over.7 Their contribution was dedicated to the ‘shopping center’, as existing centers of this kind did not have any redeeming qualities in their view: stores were aligned on both sides of a street; parking facilities were inadequate; there was no shelter in case of rain and excessive signage was a source of confusion. So they set out to define the ideal shopping center: ‘Shops could be grouped in one building surrounding a landscape area […]. No advertising disturbs the appearance of the residential streets. Each end of the block has parking space and loading and unloading are carried on behind screen walls. For the shoppers there is a covered walk connecting all the stores, a restful atmosphere and protection from automobile traffic.’ Most important of all, in their view: ‘All necessities of day-to-day living can be found in the shopping center: post office, circulating library, doctors’ and dentists’ offices, and rooms for club activities, in addition to the usual shopping facilities. Shopping thus becomes a pleasure, recreation instead of a chore’ (Gruen & Krummeck, 1943, p. 101). The plans show a structure that can be expanded around a patio to accommodate new retail spaces if needed. They already included a Five and Ten Cent Store, a Beauty shop, a barber shop, a fresh produce market (fruits, vegetables, milk, etc.), a drug store and a restaurant, all of which opened onto the gallery bordering the patio. Gruen explained in 1978 that the project presented in 1943 corresponded to a ‘medium-sized neighborhood center’. The intention had in no way been to design ‘a selling machine’ but ‘a crystallization point for an existing residential community’ (Gruen, 1978b, p. 4).
- 8 In 1949, the USSR exploded its first nuclear bomb, heightening the fears of the American governm (...)
7The first shopping centers were built in the 1920s, usually in liaison with the development of residential communities – such as the Country Club Plaza in Kansas City, Westwood Village in Los Angeles, Shaker Square in Cleveland or Highland Park Village in Texas (Longstreth, 1997a, 1997b) – but these centers, modelled on old village squares, were proving to be less and less adapted to the new modes of consumption and mobility, marked by the increasing importance of the automobile. In addition, it became essential to provide suburbanites with the services they lacked at the time, not to mention that these families now represented a significant purchasing power. The suburban population grew by 43 percent between 1947 and 1953, while the US population grew by only 11 percent (Cohen, 1996, p. 1051). By 1953, suburbanites accounted for 19 percent of the US population and 29 percent of income. This shift cannot be exclusively attributed to Henry Ford. In the midst of the Cold War, it was also the result of the federal government’s desire to decentralize the population and various economic activities in order to reduce damage in the event of a Soviet nuclear attack.8 The Federal-Aid Highway Act (or National Interstate and Defense Highway Act) voted in 1956 authorized funding for 41,000 miles of highway nationwide.
8The construction of the first regional shopping centers took place in this context. In 1951, Gruen founded Victor Gruen Associates (VGA) with the architects Karl Van Leuven, Rudi Baumfeld, and Edgardo Contini, and the firm quickly made a name for itself in the world of commercial architecture. With the opening in 1954 of Northland’s ‘pioneering’ regional shopping center in the middle of a residential area twelve miles from Detroit, Michigan, the ‘little dream’ of 1943 was transformed ‘into a huge reality’ of one million square feet, with a parking lot that could accommodate 10,000 cars (Gruen, 1978b, p. 4). Northland is one of the four regional shopping centers that make up the Master Decentralization Plan drafted in 1949 for the Webber family, owners of the J. L. Hudson Department store, an emblematic store in downtown Detroit. The Master Decentralization Plan, developed on a regional scale, called for the construction of three or four regional shopping centers – Eastland Center, Northland Center, Westland Center, and Southland Center – located approximately ten miles from the center of Detroit; the intention was to build each one near two major traffic arteries where it would serve a population of about 500,000.
- 9 According to Serge Goldberg, ‘one out of every ten customers arrives by bus’, cf. ‘Le Centre com (...)
9The opening of Northland was an event: it was the largest shopping center in the United States. Eighty-five stores were organized around the Hudson Department Store, along covered galleries surrounding patios and courts with fountains and art. The main references invoked by Gruen are the marketplace and the arcades of the European city. The design of the outdoor spaces by landscape architect Edward Eichstadt was as important, if not more so, than the buildings themselves. Women could stroll freely and children could play without fear of danger, as cars were not allowed inside the center. Northland also had two auditoriums, clubrooms with kitchens, restaurants, an infirmary and a nursery. Fashion shows, performances, concerts and exhibitions were held there. Even when the stores were closed on Sundays, a large crowd came to walk around. It was also possible to reach Northland by public transport.9 Some visitors expressed surprise about not having such spaces in the city.
10The Webber family, in Gruen’s eyes, perfectly embodied the idea of ‘merchant princes’ concerned with the well-being of their contemporaries. However, this was by no means a loss-making venture, as the returns were far greater than originally estimated by Larry Smith (1901-1967), the economist with whom Gruen worked throughout his career. Northland’s Hudson store became the most profitable in the United States (Wall, 2005, p. 87).
11With Northland, Gruen confirmed that his definition of the shopping center corresponded to the expectations of American families. ‘What is a shopping center?’ he asked in 1952 in Progressive Architecture. To which he replied: ‘A shopping center must be more than a mere collection of stores and shops. // A shopping center must be even more than its name implies – a center for shopping. // The regional shopping center must, besides performing its commercial function, fill the vacuum created by the absence of social, cultural, and civic crystallization points in our vast suburban areas. […] Regional shopping centers may well be regarded as satellite downtown areas offering much of what the metropolitan centers give and adding the decisive advantage that, if they are designed correctly and scientifically, they will take care of today’s needs and today’s living. […] They will offer restfulness, safety, and esthetic values’ (Gruen, 1952, pp. 67-68). Northland became such a success that it even attracted visitors from abroad. Positing the shopping center as a new social and cultural hub of the suburban community and not only an economic one was in fact Gruen’s real contribution. However, for the project to be conceived and constructed in this way presupposed likeminded clients, people who shared this vision – such as the Webber family, James Rouse, etc. It was not always the case. Some investors had less altruistic aims and were primarily concerned with maximizing profitability. And some architects, such as John Graham Jr. (1908-1991), the designer of the Northgate Shopping Center (1946-1950) in Seattle, were far from sharing Gruen’s ideals.
12Gruen’s reputation was further enhanced two years later with the inauguration, in 1956, of the Southdale Shopping Center on the outskirts of Minneapolis, Minnesota. Southdale, financed by the Dayton family, owners of the department store of the same name in Minneapolis, was the first shopping center organized on two levels thanks to escalators; it was therefore much more compact than Northland. It was enclosed and fully air-conditioned to protect visitors from the harsh Minneapolis winter and extreme summer heat. Its inauguration was another event. The publications of the time highlight its vast double-height space, used to host fashion shows, concerts, balls, exhibitions, etc. The other major innovation was in the urban planning: the shopping center (on 84 acres) was designed to be the heart of a 462-acre ‘suburban development’ composed of single-family homes, apartments, schools, parks, playgrounds, and medical centers. In Northland, Gruen and Smith had already noted the importance of preempting adjacent land in order to control future development and prevent another shopping center from imposing itself nearby. They had verified that their shopping center perfectly fulfilled its role as a magnet and attracted a multitude of new activities around it – office buildings, medical and cultural centers – but these were built next to each other in a completely disorganized manner, adding as many parking spaces, accentuating the waste of land and disorienting people who could not get from one place to another without taking their car. So Southdale went a step further, with a more coordinated development around the ‘heart’ of the shopping center.
13While the main references for the construction of Northland were the market square and the agora, Gruen stated that for Southdale he was inspired by Italian galleries – such as the Victor Emmanuel II Gallery in Milan. Both Northland and Southdale, considered by Gruen to be two ‘pioneering shopping centers,’ were idealized transpositions of European downtowns into the American suburbs. As he saw it, the main purpose of the shopping center was to counter the chaos of suburban sprawl. ‘Architecture’s most urgent mission today is to convert chaos into order, change mechanization from a tyrant to a slave and thus make place for beauty where there is vulgarity and ugliness’ he explained in 1955 at the International Conference of Design in Aspen (Colorado). To achieve this goal, he was convinced that ‘Architecture today cannot concern itself only with that one particular set of structures which happen to stand upright and be hollow ‘buildings’ in the conventional sense. It must concern itself with all man made elements which form our environments, with roads and highways, with signs and posters, with outdoor spaces as created by structures, with cityscape and landscape’ (Gruen, 1955, n.p.). As a result, Victor Gruen Associates (VGA) was organized in such a way as to handle all aspects of commissions, from the regional to the detailed scale. The firm’s team included architects, planners, economists, structural engineers, transportation engineers, environmental specialists, decorators and graphic designers, and so on. The projects were designed in close collaboration with Larry Smith & Co. (economists) and Wilbur Smith & Co. (specialists in transportation and road infrastructure). The working method was based on involving all the stakeholders (private and public) in order to counteract the action of the city’s ‘false friends’: the traffickist, the bulldozerite, the segregator, the projectite, the economizer, etc. (Gruen, 1964, p. 99). The success of the operation depended on perfect coordination and cooperation within this ‘Planning Team’ – bringing together all the actors – that Gruen sought systematically to put together for each project (Gruen & Smith, 1960, p. 66). Although Northland and Southdale were real successes, Gruen was aware of the many points that needed to be improved. One of these, of course, was the excessive emphasis on the automobile: ‘None of these shopping centers, however, has treated successfully the appearance of the area immediately surrounding the building core, which appears like an asphalt desert occupied fully or partially by thousands of automobiles’ he regretted in The Heart of Our Cities (Gruen, 1964, p. 191). Moreover, Gruen constantly pointed out that the success enjoyed by shopping centers should not distract from the problems downtown areas were experiencing. It was not only a matter of providing a ‘heart’ for the suburban community, it was also essential to fight for the survival of many downtowns. The latter, he asserted, could benefit from the innovations tested with the shopping center: ‘I am convinced that many of the lessons learned in the planning of large shopping centers for the suburbs can be successfully applied to our downtown urban shopping centers’ he explained as early as 1953 in Women’s Wear Daily.
14Gruen constantly alerted his contemporaries to the decline of activity in the majority of downtowns. In fact, while the urban population was growing rapidly, the population of downtowns was decreasing. In addition, a large number of activities – commercial and office – had left the center and moved to the outskirts. ‘There is a chance,’ explained Gruen in 1961, ‘that our metropolitan areas will grow vigorously and yet our downtown areas will dry up. Our cities will then resemble doughnuts with all the dough in the suburbs and a hole in the middle. What is the reason for this paradoxical phenomenon? Our downtown areas, being characteristically in the older sections of the city, have not adjusted themselves to the twentieth century. They are outmoded, out-dated and outflanked. Because of this they are suffering seriously from dwindling retail business, deteriorating real estate values and deteriorating environmental qualities. At the bottom of the problem is the fact that from year to year fewer people travel daily to the downtown area. […] He goes there only to make money, if absolutely necessary, but certainly not for the purpose of spending it. […] People who once lived in or near downtown have, if they could afford it, moved out into the suburbs. Their reasons are that downtown is too noisy, too dirty, too dangerous and too ugly. […] Revitalization of downtown has become in the last five years a clarion call’ (Gruen, 1961, pp. 131-132). The pedestrian shopping mall was conceived as one of the key elements of the revitalization plans that Gruen was calling for, encompassing all the essential dimensions and functions of the city: housing, traffic, commerce and economic activities as a whole, services, cultural venues, etc. The shopping mall was therefore the counterpart of the regional shopping center and, like the latter, required a reflection on a regional scale.
- 10 Cf., for example, L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui, 70, January 1957, pp. 53-37.
15In 1956, the same year that Southdale was inaugurated, Gruen presented A Greater Fort Worth Tomorrow Plan, his proposal to revitalize downtown Fort Worth. His goal was to transform the downtown area into a vast pedestrian zone surrounded by a beltway leading motorists to six evenly distributed parking garages. These would function as ‘gates’ to pedestrian plazas and malls providing access to shops, public services, banks, bars, restaurants, cultural venues, etc. One of the Plan’s strongest advocates was Jane Jacobs. In the article ‘Downtown is for People’ she explained: ‘The Plan by Victor Gruen Associates for Forth Worth is an outstanding example. It has been publicized chiefly for its arrangements to provide enormous perimeter parking garages and convert the downtown into a pedestrian island, but its main purpose is to enliven the streets with variety and details. […] The whole point is to make the streets more surprising, more compact, more variegated, and busier than before – not less so. One of the beauties of the Fort Worth plan is that it works with existing buildings, and this is a positive virtue not just a cost-saving expedient’ (Jacobs, 1958, p. 137). The Plan was never implemented, however, because the residents of the recently annexed suburban areas were against any investment in the city center. The idea that the inner city could become attractive again, because it offered better living conditions, was clearly not shared by a majority of the residents of the metropolitan area. In spite of this resistance, the publicity the Plan received in many newspapers and magazines, including international ones,10 helped spread Gruen’s ideas. They inspired investors and property owners in Kalamazoo, Michigan; Fresno, California; and Rochester, New York. The National Housing Act of 1954 and the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 made it possible for cities to receive federal funds for the renovation of their commercial districts.
- 11 Year in which the pedestrianization of Kettwiger Strasse in Essen was completed.
- 12 Soon, department stores left Fulton Street Mall and activity declined in the downtown area. Afte (...)
- 13 The percentage of sales taking place in downtown areas continued to decline after World War II, (...)
16The first pedestrian shopping mall in the United States was inaugurated in 1959 in Kalamazoo.11 Although Burdick Street Mall immediately became very popular, it was only semi-successful in Gruen’s view. In fact, only one part of the project was completed: the pedestrian mall. It lacked the infrastructure that was supposed to ensure its longevity: beltway, parking lots, street improvements, mixed-use development, etc. The same was true of Fresno, where Fulton Street was transformed into a pedestrian mall without the regional plan being implemented. The rivalry between downtown and the suburbs always had the same unfortunate outcome for the former. Nevertheless, the Fulton Street Mall was an undeniable success from its inauguration in 1964. The spaces carefully designed by landscape architect Garret Eckbo attracted crowds who appreciated being able to stroll in a setting featuring fountains, vegetation and sculptures, from which cars were excluded. In 1968, the Fulton Street Mall received a National Design Excellence award from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development. Numerous publications praised the revival of downtown Fresno and VGA promoted the project by producing and widely distributing – namely at international conferences – the documentary A City Reborn. However, this did not prevent the ‘schizophrenic’ attitude – in Gruen’s words – adopted by the City of Fresno, which authorized the construction of new office buildings and shopping centers on the outskirts.12 ‘Today’s life is a double life. We are living in suburbs where we can’t work and we are working in places where we can’t live’ lamented Gruen (Gruen, 1956, n.p.).13
- 14 Business at Midtown Plaza began to decline in the 1980s. Both department stores closed in the ea (...)
17Midtown Plaza, inaugurated in 1962 in Rochester, New York, is probably the ‘multifunctional center’ project that best reflected Gruen’s ideals. It became the city’s main public space and a magnet for new economic activity. It represented a further step in the process of integrating all functions into a more compact structure. This was achieved by implementing the ‘podium principle’: the pedestrian mall – ‘the garden court’ – completely enclosed, surrounded by two floors of shops, sat upon three levels of underground parking. All of this was then topped by a tower housing offices, a bar and restaurant, and a hotel. The visitor to Midtown Plaza found restaurants, cafés, banks, a post office, a school, and a bus station for regional bus lines.14 Serge Goldberg, who at the time was director of general studies at the Institut d’aménagement et d’urbanisme de la région parisienne (IAURP), remarked: ‘The example of Midtown Plaza in Rochester, New York, shows that a renovation of this kind, which consists of applying to the heart of the city the principles that have made peripheral centers successful (pedestrian walkway, merchandise delivery tunnel, rational layout of the various commercial components), can present many advantages. With one tenth of the footprint, good public transportation links and several floors of underground parking, Midtown Plaza offers office, hotel and meeting spaces in addition to the Northland’s retail facilities. By proving that more numerous and more diverse activities can be clustered in the heart of the city without sacrificing accessibility, Midtown Plaza can be an alternative to Northland. Building a new urban center in the heart of a residential area that opens up to it may be another’ (Goldberg, 1967, p. 38).
- 15 A delegation from Paris (Conseil d’administration du District de la région de Paris) visited Los (...)
18During the final years of his American career, Gruen advocated strongly for a New City Program ‘to provide an alternative to Megalopolis and to encourage a more imaginative utilization of our natural assets for urban settlement’ (Victor Gruen Associates, 1966, p. 18). The new city of Valencia, California, built in 1963 in the Los Angeles metropolitan area, is probably the best illustration of Gruen’s ideals. It received numerous visits, notably by foreign delegations, which helped to further establish its reputation.15 The attention his work was attracting gave Gruen hope that his ideas would be better received in Europe, where, he imagined, his conception of the city as a place of sociability, culture and exchange would be better understood, because it would be shared.
- 16 In 1967, Gruen founded a new agency: Victor Gruen International, based in Vienna (Austria).
- 17 A significant number of letters attest to the constant exchanges with the managers of the depart (...)
19Aware of the changes that Europe was undergoing, Gruen spent nearly three months in various European countries in 1962 with the aim of expanding Victor Gruen Associates’ business on the old continent.16 An ever increasing number of consultancy requests ensued, in particular from the managers of department stores concerned about the future development of their brand. Gruen’s clients in the mid-1960s included the Grand Bazar (Antwerp), Au Bon Marché (Brussels), La Rinascente and Upim in Italy, Migros in Switzerland, and the Nouvelles Galeries and Au Printemps in France.17 The role played by the directors of these department stores was essential: they effectively established the architect’s presence in Europe by commissioning him to carry out studies to define the ways in which they could develop their business not only in city centers, but also on a regional and national scale. To respond to these requests, Gruen renewed his collaboration with Larry Smith.
- 18 The Prisunic stores were created by Au Printemps in 1931.
- 19 Cf. the exchanges of letters between Gruen and C. Carpentier or J. Gittard of the Société des Ma (...)
- 20 The first contracts with the Au Printemps group were signed in November 1965.
20In France, the Nouvelles Galeries, Au Printemps, and other groups were embarking at the time on a strategy of colonizing the national territory by opening a multitude of new stores in Bordeaux, Nancy, Lyon, Marseille, Avignon, Aix-en-Provence, etc. As it happens, Gruen’s first contacts with France went back to 1961, when the Société des Magasins Prisunic18 called on VGA to redesign the layout of its Nantes store.19 Jean Barral, the project manager who had supervised the work in Nantes, was later appointed construction director for the Printemps-Prisunic group and chose to continue the collaboration with Gruen.20 He went on to become one of the architect’s closest partners in the development of numerous projects. For Gruen, this relationship of trust created with the heads of department stores was just as important as the one he strove to maintain with various decision-makers, especially in political and economic fields.
- 21 Institut d’aménagement et d’urbanisme de la région parisienne (I.A.U.R.P.), 15, ‘Urbanisme aux U (...)
- 22 For example: ‘Le point de vue de Victor Gruen. Les centres commerciaux des quinze prochaines ann (...)
- 23 Dated 1968, the film was nevertheless screened in Brussels in November 1966 according to a lette (...)
21Leaders and officials had crossed the Atlantic several times to visit shopping centers and new towns.21 According to Etienne Thil, there were 2,347 French attendees of Bernardo Trujillo’s seminars for the National Cash Register between 1957 and 1965 (Thil, 1966, p. 131), the largest national participation of any country represented. Gruen himself gave multiple lectures, which were then translated and published in the specialized press.22 The one he gave in Brussels in November 1966, at the Congrès d’urbanisme commercial (Urbanicom), left a lasting impression on the participants. Gruen presented the documentary A City Reborn,23 intended to illustrate how much progress had been made since the first shopping center was built and to praise the pedestrian shopping mall. His words resonated with the concerns of a number of European cities, several of which were beginning to embark on the pedestrianization of their main shopping streets. Essen (Germany) was the first to try the experiment in 1959 (Wuppertal, Cologne and Düsseldorf followed); in France, Rouen pedestrianized its first street in 1969-1970 (Feriel). During these international congresses, Gruen constantly urged Europeans to look at the situation in the United States. And while he was pleased that Shopping Towns USA. The Planning of Shopping Centers was acclaimed by many, he reminded his audience of a key distinction made in the book: ‘It is deeply significant that the term is ‘shopping center,’ not ‘selling center. This clearly indicates that the wishes and desires of the shopper take priority over those of the seller’ (Gruen, Smith, 1960, p. 23).
- 24 Which was held in Hoddesdon in 1951.
- 25 Analyses presented at CIAM 4 in Athens and summarized in the Athens Charter, published by Le Cor (...)
- 26 The debates continued in 1935 during the CIAM 9 in Aix en Provence.
- 27 Gruen V. (1961), ‘Cities to Doughnuts’, National Civic Review, March, pp. 131-132.
22The ideals Gruen defended in the mid-1960s were further elaborated in his book The Heart of Our Cities. The Urban Crisis: Diagnosis and Cure (1964). The title explicitly refers to the 1952 publication of the works of the 8th International Congress of Modern Architecture (CIAM)24 by Jaqueline Tyrwhitt, Jose Luis Sert and Ernesto N. Rogers under the title: The Heart of the City: Towards the Humanisation of Urban Life. In fact, while the pre-war publications of the CIAM had highlighted the dysfunctions of the old centers,25 the post-war discussions viewed this ‘heart’ of the cities as a place of sociability essential to the life of the urban community.26 The reconstruction of many urban centers after World War II was the subject of intense debate, as was the place reserved for automobiles (Buchanan, 1963). For Gruen, it was important that everything be done to ensure that the European city did not fall victim to the phenomenon of the doughnut:27 the downfall of the city-center precipitated by the flight of residents and activities to the periphery, devastating centrifugal forces that he had seen at work in many cities, small or large, such as Fresno or Detroit.
- 28 Cf. in particular the report drafted by the SERETES consulting firm, ‘Les conséquences pour l’ur (...)
23Clearly, there was a frequent disconnect, even a real lack of understanding, between the expectations of Europeans looking across the Atlantic28 and undertaking scouting trips to the United States to visit shopping centers, motivated by the dream of building the same in Europe, and Victor Gruen’s thinking as he returned to his native continent, which continued to be shaped by the crystallized image of the European city, its vitality and its social life.
- 29 In January 1966, Gruen was invited to participate in a meeting with Bernard Hirsch and Guy Édoua (...)
- 30 An initial contract between IAURP (Jean Millier) and Victor Gruen International was signed on Ja (...)
- 31 Victor Gruen, Freeman Fox Wilbur Smith & associates, Larry Smith & Co (1969), ‘La Défense Zone A (...)
24In 1965, the Paris region master plan (Schéma directeur d’aménagement et d’urbanisme de la région parisienne, SDAURP) was adopted. It provided for the creation of new urban centers, and a ‘program of regional and inter-municipal commercial centers in the Paris region’ (1965), elaborated by the Institut d’aménagement et d’urbanisme de la région parisienne (IAURP), was also under discussion. In 1966, Gruen was invited to meet with Paul Delouvrier, a delegate to the District of the Paris Region, to examine the situation of future business districts and commercial centers in the region.29 He was also hired as a consultant for the projects of the new towns of Evry, Noisy-le-Grand and Trappes,30 as well as for the study of western part of La Défense.31 While Gruen enthusiastically welcomed these assignments entrusted to him, disenchantment soon set in.
- 32 Cf. for example Gruen V. (1959), ‘And after the sixties. Cluster communities for Tomorrow?’ Jour (...)
25The studies on the future new towns indeed presented several points of interest for Gruen. They confirmed the need to view the metropolis as a multipolar whole, as a cellular metropolis,32 in a way that best manages the distribution of different activities while avoiding inequities and the squandering of resources and energy, or limiting the waste of agricultural land and the destruction of landscapes. This meant designing denser ‘cores’, according to a hierarchy ranging from the neighborhood scale to that of the ‘village’, up to the true center of the new town. This center would bring together all of the essential functions in terms of employment, administration, commerce, residential, cultural activities, education, leisure, etc. It would be easily accessible and as compact as possible so as to facilitate pedestrian mobility, as cars were excluded.
- 33 Several collaborations ended in legal actions, such as those with EPAD concerning the La Défense (...)
26The outcome for a majority of these projects was disappointing, even contentious in some cases.33 The report that Gruen submitted in August 1968 to the IAURP gave an account of the difficulties he encountered as a consultant, his role being reduced to that of ‘critic’, a position that was frustrating, to say the least, for the architect, whose competencies could have been used to better advantage. He regrets that his expertise was not appreciated to its proper measure. The instances to whom he reported – the Missions in charge of the preliminary studies for the projects of four of the five new towns planned by the 1965 Master Plan – seemed in fact to see him only as the designer of shopping centers, as he noted with a touch of bitterness: ‘Some of the missions realizing this have asked me to send them full scale plans of executed shopping centers in order to give them a realistic example but I hesitate to do this because an American regional shopping center is by no means fully applicable to the case of the new town center of the ‘villes nouvelles’ and because I fear that the submission of such plans could lead to blind imitation of American examples, which for many reasons are not applicable to Europe generally or to France specifically’ (Gruen, 1968, p. 33).
- 34 The outcome was not to be any happier for the Louvain-la-Neuve project, cf. Lechat J.-M. (2006), (...)
- 35 Letter to Maurice Cauwe, August 2nd 1973 [VG LoC Box 4 folder 4].
27The fact remains that his influence was considerable, both with the clients and with his fellow architects and planners. The testimonies of a major player of the time such as Jean-Louis Solal – ‘a pioneer of French-style shopping centers’ (de Moncan, 2008, p. 300) – attest to this. The experience of Evry, in particular, reveals several points of disagreement and misunderstanding that frequently characterized his relations with the clients, whose position was sometimes ambiguous. Commissioned as a consultant, Gruen’s input could only very rarely go beyond study and advice, the management of the project being jealously guarded by his French colleagues.34 Moreover, the working method he had developed in the United States was all the more difficult to replicate in the Paris region – or in France in general – where political and economic, public and private issues came into play, and conflicts arose between the various interests defended by administrations or departments that were often sovereign in their decisions. In France, it was impossible for Gruen to create the ‘Planning Team’ that had made his American projects so successful. His proposals, however, left a mark on the minds of designers and decision-makers, and a great deal of research is still needed to fully grasp the influence of the principles elaborated by Gruen on the evolution of urban planning, including in Europe, in the 1960s and 1970s. The shopping center is not his only legacy. The ambition to reintegrate a significant functional mix into a single piece of architecture – or megastructure as the critic Reyner Banham (1976) put it – is another essential contribution of Gruen’s thinking that still deserves to be assessed. His project for Evry (but there are others, such as Monza in Italy) illustrates this desire to create a centrality that is as compact as possible in order to foster exchange across all the functions – economic, social, cultural, residential, recreational – that are interwoven into a complex infrastructure, designed to manage all the flows and technical systems necessary for the proper functioning of the city. Similarly, in these transatlantic transfers, it remains to be seen what impact the pedestrian shopping mall had in Europe (Feriel, 2022; Gregg, 2019). Back in his native Vienna, whose ‘heart’ had served as a reference for the design of these new twentieth-century hubs – the shopping center and the shopping mall –, Gruen came to the City Council with a project to pedestrianize the old city. Just as in his design of seventeen years earlier for Fort Worth, garages were placed on the outskirts of the center to store the thousands of cars that would no longer be allowed to enter. Mini-buses, powered by liquid gas to reduce noise and air pollution, enabled people to reach the farthest points of the city center, and a subway (designed to carry both passengers and freight) connected the center to other parts of the city to reduce automobile traffic. Again, the plan was only partially implemented, as streets were only gradually pedestrianized. In 1973, Gruen is invited to speak on the pedestrianization of streets at a congress organized by Urbanicom. He informed Maurice Cauwe, President of GB Entreprise and Urbanicom, with whom he had been in contact for several years, of his absence. He expresses his sense of failure here too, as pedestrian malls offer no long-term solution. If they are not part of a plan to develop public transport and manage motorized traffic, they simply shift traffic onto other streets, turning pedestrianized streets into a ‘Potemkin village’. Gruen is familiar with many of the examples that will be discussed at the conference, and he is convinced that they will quickly create rather than solve major problems. Lined exclusively with large stores, and emptied of all other activity, ‘the pedestrian zone would appear as nothing else than a transferal of suburban regional shopping center into the middle of the city’. 35
28The exchanges between Gruen and his European clients, partners and friends reveal a gap in expectations that is worth observing. It is also interesting to analyze the discrepancy between Gruen’s practice (as he continues to respond to these clients’ requests) and his increasingly critical attitude towards the solutions he had devised. Research into his European work is interesting from this point of view. Few architects have been involved in so many projects in various European countries in the space of a decade, at the invitation of professional, political and economic sphere. The fact that his expertise has been called upon to such an extent raises questions and merits further exploration, as the history of commercial architecture and urban planning has yet to be written, at a time when these infrastructures are being called into question by the online shopping economy and challenged for their environmental impact. Apart from the failure of the shopping center and the pedestrian shopping mall, the end of Gruen’s career was marked by the ecological crisis in addition to the urban crisis, and these new issues must also be taken into account to understand his doubts and the evolution of his thinking. His last book Centers for the Urban Environment. Survival of the Cities (1973) in which he brings together many of his projects – both completed and aborted – paints a much more pessimistic picture of the situation, the challenge now being, for the architect and urban planner, to ensure ‘human survival on this planet’ (Gruen, 1973, p. 3).