Information AboutVictor Gruen |
| CATEGORIES ABOUT VICTOR GRUEN | |
| architects | |
| gruen, victor | |
| american architects | |
| jewish architects | |
| austrian jews | |
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Gruen was born an Austrian Jew. He grew up in Vienna and studied architecture at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts. A committed socialist, from 1926 until 1934 he ran the "political cabaret at the Naschmarkt "-theatre. At that time he came to know Felix Slavik , the future mayor (after the nazi-time) of Vienna, and they became friends. When Germany took over Austria in 1938 he emigrated to the United States. Short and stout, he landed "with an architect's degree, eight dollars, and no English." Gruen designed Northland Mall , an open air shopping mall near Detroit in 1954. Then he designed Southdale Mall , the first enclosed shopping mall in the country in Edina, Minnesota . Opening in 1956, Southdale was meant as the kernel of a full-fledged community. The mall was commercially successful, but the original design was never fully-realized, as the intended apartment buildings, schools, medical facilities, park and lake were not built. Despite Gruen's efforts in the United States, in 1978, two years before his death in a country house outside Vienna, Gruen disavowed other shopping mall developments as having "bastardized" his idea. SEE ALSO
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