Victor Gruen was born Viktor Grünbaum in Austria on 18 July 1903. In 1941, he moved to Los Angeles in the US and he became a pioneer in the design of shopping malls. He passed away on 14 February 1980.
His vision for a shopping center was inspired by the beautiful European squares, typically those in Vienna. A Redditor, Engelberto, explains:
“I believe his starting observation was that the new suburbs all lacked a center – a commercial, cultural, social center. His idea of a mall would give those places a center. A modern, indoor interpretation of an old world town core. Where people would meet and where cultural events and the like could be held. It would look very different from a European city but it would serve the same functions that he felt were missing in surburbia. The main problem was that mall investors would remove from the plans anything that was not commercial and would serve to maximise revenue. Any added value that could not be expressed in numbers was seen as superfluous.”
Victor Gruen really wanted Americans to experience what he, when he was in Vienna, had experienced: a central place where people would meet and share experiences. Unfortunately, the investors thought otherwise and only concentrated on the shopping in mall.
This is why, today, most malls, including the ones in Mauritius, are first and foremost shopping and eating malls. There are not really places for people to meet and spend time together.
Lately, I have also noticed that many malls are very noisy. Christina and I even had to flee from one a few weeks ago because an (uneducated) animator was making way too much (stupid) noises.
Still, we are fortunate in Mauritius, because it’s a tropical island, to still have some malls which are nice for people to spend time in. Personally, I have no issue with, say, Bagatelle or Trianon. Some malls do stress me a lot though and I don’t like going there but I will not name them out of decency.
The Redditor, Engelberto, adds:
“And this kind of worked for many decades. But I wonder if the slow death of shopping malls in the last 20 years or so could have been avoided if these places offered modern shoppers more diverse reasons for going there. Something that cannot be replicated through online shopping.”
Malls are not dead in Mauritius. In fact, we had a new mall pretty much every month. But, this is not sustainable and, at one point, people, including investors, will get bored.
Interestingly, Engelberto also says that online shopping (naturally) only focusses on the shopping and completely forgoes the social aspects of going to a mall. In the future, we might all do our shopping online and people might stop seeing each other. I am not sure I want this.
No wonder Victor Gruen decided to return to Vienna when he became old and, in a speech in London in 1978, he disavowed shopping mall developments as having “bastardised” his ideas.
(This is a repost of a post I wrote initially on my family website, Noulakaz.net, but which also belong here)
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