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Old Posted Nov 29, 2014, 10:27 PM
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How the Cold War Shaped the Design of American Malls

How the Cold War Shaped the Design of American Malls


June 11, 2014

By Marni Epstein

Read More: http://curbed.com/archives/2014/06/1...ican-malls.php

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Regardless of location, the American shopping mall takes the same form: two floors of enclosed shopping and parking connected by escalators, with a lush central arboretum and two anchor department stores at either end. Today this design seems cliche, but in 1956, it was a revolutionary setup that brought comfort to a nation that feared itself on the brink of nuclear war.

- America's first mall, Southdale in Edina, Minnesota, was a Cold War-era invention that forever changed the way America lives and shops. Southdale was designed by Austrian-born architect Victor Gruen. --- Gruen grew up in the high arts scene in Vienna and designed housing projects and stores for local merchants, but he fled his home and the rise of Nazi Germany in 1938.

- He settled in America, where he first designed a leather goods boutique for Ludwig Leder on Fifth Avenue in New York. Gruen turned the typical street-fronting New York boutique on its head by designing a mini arcade entranceway for Lederer. --- Then he turned his attention to larger-scale design, entering a 1943 Architectural Forum competition called "Architecture 194x," which solicited ideas from renowned modern architects to design components of a futuristic model town.

- Gruen answered the magazine's call with a design for the town's shopping center. He proposed a fully enclosed shopping center with stores that were inward-facing, rather than street-facing. Gruen's design also lacked a center square, the green space of traditional urban shopping districts where pedestrians would mingle and stroll. Both of these changes were radical departures from previous designs and from the American shopping experience that existed at the time.

- By the time World War II ended and the Cold War began, the country's mindset had changed drastically. Against this backdrop, Gruen's design for an insular utopia had substantial appeal: America was seeking shelter and a controlled environment. --- Just over a decade after his enclosed shopping center was turned down by Architectural Forum, Gruen built Southdale mall in the Minneapolis suburbs, the world's first enclosed mall. His design for Southdale, which historian Timothy Mennel calls "a Cold War Utopia," would go on to become the blueprint of today's regional shopping mall.

- Gruen himself had actually once dreamed of designing open-air promenades reminiscent of his native Austria—spaces where neighbors could mingle and shop in close connection with the natural environment. But his dream shifted as Gruen instead drew influence from the design work of America's governmental and military institutions. Although Gruen popularized the regional shopping mall, the idea of combining both shopping and non-retail services (like movie theaters, the post office, churches, housing, etc.) in a single location came from the U.S. Federal Government.

- That America's first modern shopping centers were built by the government during the Cold War is a key indicator of how the government perceived life in this new atomic age. Gruen took these nascent ideas developed by the government and gave them a refined finish to appeal to his high-end clientele. --- Gruen first tried out his Cold War-appropriate design elements in 1952, when he designed Northland Mall in the Detroit suburbs for Michigan retailer J.L. Hudson.

- The Dayton family of Minnesota, the owners of retailer the Dayton Company (and later Target) commissioned Gruen to design Southdale Mall. Family figurehead Donald Dayton called the mall a "self-contained community," and it was massive, 810,000 square feet spread across 463 acres. The mall was located far outside the urban population center of Minneapolis, in the suburb of Edina, Minnesota.

- The suburbs were atypical retail locations at the time, and Edina had a population of just 15,000. What Edina offered was a location ten miles outside the Minneapolis city center, putting the mall outside the eight-mile blast radius of an atomic hit to the Minneapolis city core. A mall located in Edina could serve to house and protect the Twin Cities' population in the event of a nuclear attack.

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  #2  
Old Posted Nov 30, 2014, 1:52 PM
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Hmm, not exactly sure that being 10 miles from the city center would have done the trick. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba
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Old Posted Dec 1, 2014, 4:12 AM
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Don't worry, as long as they have some school desks to hide under they'll be fine.
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Old Posted Dec 1, 2014, 6:31 PM
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Interesting discussion. I had never really considered this aspect of the shopping mall boom.

In my experience, the following factors accounted for the change in shopping (and commuting) habits.

1) After WWII, huge numbers of vets and their growing families, seeking more living space than they had grown up with, moved to the less expensive, tract homes in the growing suburbs. With a VA loan, almost every veteran and his (or her) family could purchase a new home.

2) That, plus the greater availability of new cars (the auto companies had begun to reconvert weapons factories to car factories while the War was still going on) led people to abandon mass transit, which, in turn increased commute times and stimulated the freeway building boom in most major cities. By the end of the 1950s, the only cities with commuter rail were on the east coast, in the Chicago area, and, to some degree, on the peninsula south of San Francisco. Most people drove their cars.

3) The crowding on the roads wasn't confined to commuting; it became more difficult to go downtown to shop almost everywhere. Then, there was the question of what to do with the car once you arrived downtown. Downtown shopping districts had disappeared almost entirely within 20 years of the end of the War. Major exceptions were New York, Chicago, and San Francisco. Everywhere else, downtown stores were closing fast.

4) In Texas, where I grew up, another reason for the rapid growth of malls was that they had begun to be entirely enclosed and air conditioned by the late 1950s. I think the first air conditioned malls in Houston, Dallas, and San Antonio had all opened by 1960 and were rapidly followed by others.

Now, the country is almost entirely "malled". I never did like them much. Beverly Hills is about a 20-minute commute from where I live (in good traffic) and there are plenty of stores and garages with valet, but given the time, I still prefer shopping in San Francisco - downtown, in big stores.

j
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Old Posted Dec 1, 2014, 8:40 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by jg6544 View Post
Now, the country is almost entirely "malled". I never did like them much. Beverly Hills is about a 20-minute commute from where I live (in good traffic) and there are plenty of stores and garages with valet, but given the time, I still prefer shopping in San Francisco - downtown, in big stores.
This is one of the reasons I love NYC. We have like 7 malls in the whole city of 8.3 million people.
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Old Posted Dec 1, 2014, 8:59 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by jg6544 View Post
Interesting discussion. I had never really considered this aspect of the shopping mall boom.

In my experience, the following factors accounted for the change in shopping (and commuting) habits.

1) After WWII, huge numbers of vets and their growing families, seeking more living space than they had grown up with, moved to the less expensive, tract homes in the growing suburbs. With a VA loan, almost every veteran and his (or her) family could purchase a new home.

2) That, plus the greater availability of new cars (the auto companies had begun to reconvert weapons factories to car factories while the War was still going on) led people to abandon mass transit, which, in turn increased commute times and stimulated the freeway building boom in most major cities. By the end of the 1950s, the only cities with commuter rail were on the east coast, in the Chicago area, and, to some degree, on the peninsula south of San Francisco. Most people drove their cars.

3) The crowding on the roads wasn't confined to commuting; it became more difficult to go downtown to shop almost everywhere. Then, there was the question of what to do with the car once you arrived downtown. Downtown shopping districts had disappeared almost entirely within 20 years of the end of the War. Major exceptions were New York, Chicago, and San Francisco. Everywhere else, downtown stores were closing fast.

4) In Texas, where I grew up, another reason for the rapid growth of malls was that they had begun to be entirely enclosed and air conditioned by the late 1950s. I think the first air conditioned malls in Houston, Dallas, and San Antonio had all opened by 1960 and were rapidly followed by others.

Now, the country is almost entirely "malled". I never did like them much. Beverly Hills is about a 20-minute commute from where I live (in good traffic) and there are plenty of stores and garages with valet, but given the time, I still prefer shopping in San Francisco - downtown, in big stores.

j
I completely agree with these points and these are definitely the practical reason for why malls popped up. This article did however make an interesting ideological connection that seems to be an underlying driver of all of the patters you outlined above when it said, " Against this backdrop, Gruen's design for an insular utopia had substantial appeal:"

With this line, the article reminds us that Americans during the early part of the cold war were searching for utopia in almost every form. This mindset seemed to permeate every facet of life from perfect lawns and houses associated with the 50s to literature such as Fahrenheit 451 that continuously dared to create futuristic "utopias." Given this, it would make sense that shopping mall would have such deep appeal because every mall was a little utopia and could be controlled in every possible way.

Though the other cold war connections may be a stretch a best, this connection with utopia really resonated with me and highlighted the ideological shift that was needed to create the mall. Without this ideological shift to complement the geographic shift, we might have seen the town centers of today's more progressive suburbs pop up in 1955.. Similarly, without the present day disillusionment of utopia, we might see a demand for downtown malls vs outdoor, street-facing retail.
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Old Posted Dec 2, 2014, 5:46 PM
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Originally Posted by skunkachunks View Post
I completely agree with these points and these are definitely the practical reason for why malls popped up. This article did however make an interesting ideological connection that seems to be an underlying driver of all of the patters you outlined above when it said, " Against this backdrop, Gruen's design for an insular utopia had substantial appeal:"

With this line, the article reminds us that Americans during the early part of the cold war were searching for utopia in almost every form. This mindset seemed to permeate every facet of life from perfect lawns and houses associated with the 50s to literature such as Fahrenheit 451 that continuously dared to create futuristic "utopias." Given this, it would make sense that shopping mall would have such deep appeal because every mall was a little utopia and could be controlled in every possible way.

Though the other cold war connections may be a stretch a best, this connection with utopia really resonated with me and highlighted the ideological shift that was needed to create the mall. Without this ideological shift to complement the geographic shift, we might have seen the town centers of today's more progressive suburbs pop up in 1955.. Similarly, without the present day disillusionment of utopia, we might see a demand for downtown malls vs outdoor, street-facing retail.
I don't think there was another time in our history when the country embraced "futurism" the way they did following the world's fairs in the 1930s. It really blossomed in the 1950s. I was a child, but I remember flying cars, the "plastics house" at Disneyland; "Tomorrowland" and Disneyland. We seemed to lose that in the 1960s. Finally put a man on the moon and promptly lost interest. And I never did get a flying car.
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Old Posted Dec 16, 2014, 1:29 AM
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Originally Posted by jg6544 View Post
I don't think there was another time in our history when the country embraced "futurism" the way they did following the world's fairs in the 1930s. It really blossomed in the 1950s. I was a child, but I remember flying cars, the "plastics house" at Disneyland; "Tomorrowland" and Disneyland. We seemed to lose that in the 1960s. Finally put a man on the moon and promptly lost interest. And I never did get a flying car.
Pretty sure this is a result of you being a child in the 1950s, and thus a baby boomer, the largest generation of Americans up until that point. It was your generation that killed the dream of space and science in the 1970s and 1980s. People of my generation, the under-30s, embrace futurism in ways people couldn't even imagine in the 30s, not simply because of computers, but because the ideas of AI, mars missions, seamless personal electronics, and robotics are all coming within our lifetime.

In the 1930s there were no televisions, no computers, and very little faith that space exploration was possible and even imminent.
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Old Posted Feb 1, 2015, 4:21 PM
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I read in a couple places he wanted it to be open area in the middle with or without a roof. And hated they turned his idea it into a giant box under glass!
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Old Posted Feb 2, 2015, 6:31 PM
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Originally Posted by fimiak View Post
Pretty sure this is a result of you being a child in the 1950s, and thus a baby boomer, the largest generation of Americans up until that point. It was your generation that killed the dream of space and science in the 1970s and 1980s. People of my generation, the under-30s, embrace futurism in ways people couldn't even imagine in the 30s, not simply because of computers, but because the ideas of AI, mars missions, seamless personal electronics, and robotics are all coming within our lifetime.

In the 1930s there were no televisions, no computers, and very little faith that space exploration was possible and even imminent.
More than anything else, I think it was the realization that exploration of anything other than the moon by human beings was going to be hideously expensive and so was colonizing the moon. There just were too few attainable goals for space exploration and nobody was prepared to have their taxes increased to pay for going after those. Also, the cost of defending not only the U. S., but most of western Europe had begun to bite; then, there was the ridiculous war in Vietnam to begin to pay for.
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Old Posted Feb 2, 2015, 11:54 PM
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More than anything else, I think it was the realization that exploration of anything other than the moon by human beings was going to be hideously expensive and so was colonizing the moon. There just were too few attainable goals for space exploration and nobody was prepared to have their taxes increased to pay for going after those. Also, the cost of defending not only the U. S., but most of western Europe had begun to bite; then, there was the ridiculous war in Vietnam to begin to pay for.
Taxes for the upper class at the time were, like, 91%, so they couldn't really raise the taxes anyway.

Kind of sad that they put off knowledge in favour of a fruitless war.
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Old Posted Feb 3, 2015, 5:57 PM
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Taxes for the upper class at the time were, like, 91%, so they couldn't really raise the taxes anyway.

Kind of sad that they put off knowledge in favour of a fruitless war.
That's not entirely true. I don't know what the top marginal bracket was in the mid-70s, but it was nowhere near 91%. Additionally, that is a marginal rate; if you fall into that bracket today (which is 39%), only your income in excess of the trigger amount is taxed at that rate.
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