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Rating: 
Summary: this is american culture at its best
Review: A great read and remarkable that no one has written about Gruen before now. if American retail and architecture is your thing, this is a must have. Hardwick captures Gruen in an objective light, in his time, for the reader to judge. can't wait for the next Hardwick bio.
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Summary: New view of malls and shopping
Review: I heard the author on the radio and thought this sounded interesting, it was definitely worth it. I'm an architect and have worked on a few retail projects, although no malls yet, so I could easily identify with Gruen. He seemed both to be a naive dreamer and a very calculating businessman. He was also caught up in the American cycle of trying to make one more buck. Gruen's story made me rethink the reasons why Americans love shopping so much--all the lights, art, and designs do nothing but make us believe that shopping is enjoyable. Is it really? Gruen's story also made me think about why architects think they can solve the world's problems with better buildings; I guess it goes with the territory.
Rating:
Summary: New view of malls and shopping
Review: I heard the author on the radio and thought this sounded interesting, it was definitely worth it. I'm an architect and have worked on a few retail projects, although no malls yet, so I could easily identify with Gruen. He seemed both to be a naive dreamer and a very calculating businessman. He was also caught up in the American cycle of trying to make one more buck. Gruen's story made me rethink the reasons why Americans love shopping so much--all the lights, art, and designs do nothing but make us believe that shopping is enjoyable. Is it really? Gruen's story also made me think about why architects think they can solve the world's problems with better buildings; I guess it goes with the territory.
Rating: 
Summary: First?
Review: Mr. Gruen developed and expanded the concept, but no, he did not originate it - he and the automobile made it more successful and widespread, enriching us all.
1956 the first mall? Er, no, not really: not by a century. Google "Arcade+Providence" The Arcade Building building by J.C. Bucklin & Russell Warren, 1827-1829
The shopping arcade started here. While not called "shopping mall" the arcades were the start of having multiple shops under a single roof. The shopping mall is the same, with addition of parking and not usually urban but sub-urban or even rural.
Rating:
Summary: I shopped in his mall!
Review: My first true mall shopping was done in a Gruen mall, although I was quite unaware at the time of the fascinating story behind this complex man and his vision for America's public spaces. Thanks to this engaging work by Hardwick, I feel now feel enlightened as I prowl the mall that Gruen built. You don't need to be an architect or a social scientist to enjoy this book because the author makes the subject approachable for the inner shopper in everyone.
Rating:
Summary: I shopped in his mall!
Review: My first true mall shopping was done in a Gruen mall, although I was quite unaware at the time of the fascinating story behind this complex man and his vision for America's public spaces. Thanks to this engaging work by Hardwick, I feel now feel enlightened as I prowl the mall that Gruen built. You don't need to be an architect or a social scientist to enjoy this book because the author makes the subject approachable for the inner shopper in everyone.
Rating:
Summary: What a character
Review: This book is totally fascinating, although a tad repetitive about retailing theories for my taste. I would never have guessed what an amazing influence Gruen had on American life (and how egotisitical he was). I think the author quotes the architect Philip Johnson saying that Gruen influenced America much more than all the arty modern architects put together. And that is so true. Gruen seemed to anticipate future trends in retailing, city planning, and architecture and then actually build them. The one question that I had was whether or not Gruen was a good guy or only in it for himself.
Rating:
Summary: Great on American culture, and he did build the first mall
Review: This is an excellent book about a single, fascinating individual and about American culture in the twentieth century. There is an irony here: Gruen was very idealistic about the mall's potential to improve society, but he didn't realize that, ultimately, his creation would cause the "malling of America." And he DID build the first mall...the first ENCLOSED mall (rather than an outdoor arcade), which was copied all over the country and is now the dominate type.
Rating:
Summary: He Placed Shopping at the Center
Review: To most people, Marx, Freud and Einstein are the Mitteleuropean trinity that gave us the modern world. But the modern world itself, sprawling giddily in all directions from old-fashioned downtowns, is as much the product of a fourth conflicted genius who happens to be from a similar background. Like Sigmund Freud, architect Victor Gruen (1903-80) was a secular Jew who fled Vienna one step ahead of the Nazis and, also like Freud, spent his career dealing unscientifically with people's subconscious desires. The difference is that Gruen's ideas have endured to reshape the American landscape, for Victor Gruen was the father of the modern shopping mall. He is now the subject of a biography by M. Jeffrey Hardwick, an editor at Smithsonian Books. Gruen was a classic American type, the brilliant and driven immigrant who struggles to achieve wealth and influence but who yearns most of all for legitimacy. Like the immigrants who built Hollywood, Gruen combined art and commerce in new ways that captured something deep in the American psyche. His powerfully demotic designs helped pave the way for the egalitarian suburban landscape most Americans choose to live in today. As it happens, the malls he designed were vastly more elegant and humane than the malls people build these days, and his individual stores -- such as the astounding Milliron's in Los Angeles -- were downright heavenly compared to the big-box retailers that now threaten to replace them. The irony is that his work in suburbia opened the door to these concrete tilt-ups that, sprouting from cornfields all over America, bring Wal-Mart, Home Depot and other mass-market retailers within a short drive of practically everybody. His most remarkable innovation -- unveiled in Edina, Minn., in 1956 -- was the first enclosed shopping mall, a climate-controlled community of retailing under a single vast canopy. But it was intended to be more than just a place to shop. It was to provide a center to otherwise centerless developments, offering community, entertainment and even enlightenment. Gruen lamented that Americans, at the time, were living "detached lives in detached houses." With his shopping- center designs, Mr. Hardwick writes, "Gruen hoped to offer a corrective to this grim and soulless American environment." The shopping centers were even supposed to contain sprawl by rounding up all the strip development and corralling it into a single planned environment. But of course they had the opposite effect, hastening the demise of old-fashioned urban neighborhoods, increasing dependence on the car and, in the ultimate indignity, fostering even more strip development, like dreadnoughts drawing barnacles. Gruen's life appears to be as interesting -- and paradoxical -- as his work. A tireless self-promoter and pamphleteer, he started out as a simple store designer and managed, over the course of his career, to repackage himself as the guru of urban salvation. In theory he embraced the automobile as fervently as most Americans did, yet personally he hated driving, hated the suburbs and eventually, it seems, hated even the vulgar, sprawling, profitable nation whose landscape he helped to shape. Among his many bad ideas was saving downtowns by banning automobiles from key streets and building giant malls and parking structures at city centers -- in effect making them more like suburbia. He also ran through four wives. It's hard to think of a better subject for a biography; thus it is hard not to be disappointed by "Mall Maker." In truth, the book is hardly a biography at all. Mr. Hardwick offers only the sketchiest outlines of Gruen's remarkable life and scant insight into his psychology. The prose is too flat to tell a vivid story. Yet the book manages to be interesting in spite of itself. Mr. Hardwick's focus is on Gruen's major projects. Along the way he provides a quick education on the decline of America's downtowns (which began as far back as the 1920s) as well as the postwar rise of car-centered suburbia and the role of shopping and consumption in the shaping of public spaces. Mr. Hardwick is at his best in highlighting the many contradictions between his subject's public pronouncements and the lucrative commissions he executed at almost complete cross-purposes to what he claimed to believe. Gruen at first condemned strip development even as he designed innovative stores for commercial strips. Then he condemned sprawl even as he designed bigger and bigger suburban shopping centers. Mr. Hardwick, unfortunately, never grapples with the larger question of why our built environment is the way it is. The short answer seems to be: People prefer it. If we really wanted to revive older cities and slow the spread of development, we easily could -- with higher- density zoning, school vouchers and punitive taxes on gasoline. But don't hold your breath waiting for any of these measures. People would much rather complain. So, apparently, did Gruen. At the end of his life he took his ample American profits and returned to Vienna, from which he condemned the U.S. even though, as Mr. Hardwick puts it, "the world of postwar America that he so lamented was, in part, his own creation."
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