Victor Gruen

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Victor Gruen (born July 18, 1903 as Victor David Grünbaum in Vienna ; † February 14, 1980 ibid) was an Austrian urban planner and architect who caused an international stir by planning the first modern shopping centers on the outskirts of cities in the USA. In Austria he is considered to be the spiritual father of the first large pedestrian zone in Vienna, which was established in 1974 in Kärntner Strasse despite strong criticism . A well-known argument of his in this matter was: "Cars don't buy anything."

Live and act

While still studying architecture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, he made a name for himself as a political cabaret artist . He openly criticized the National Socialists and was an avowed social democrat (he was already converting Otto Bauer's apartment as a young architect ).

From 1926 to 1933 or 1934, Grünbaum led the political cabaret together with Robert Ehrenzweig (later Lucas) . In the literature cabaret on the Naschmarkt , he got to know the young set-pusher Felix Slavik , who later became mayor of Vienna. This resulted in a friendship that turned out to be very positive for Vienna when he was commissioned by Felix Slavik with an inner city concept in 1965, which resulted in Vienna's first pedestrian zone in 1970.

When his architecture office was expropriated by the National Socialists in 1938 due to its “non-Aryan origins”, he emigrated to the USA . In New York City he underwent reconstruction of Fifth Avenue - boutiques quickly talked about, and in 1940 he moved for an order of a large retail chain to Los Angeles . In 1947 he planned a department store with a parking deck on the roof, which hadn't existed until then and which further boosted his popularity.

In 1949 he and his Austrian colleague Rudolf Baumfeld founded the “ Victor Gruen Associates ” working group , which soon became one of the largest American architecture firms with 300 employees (in addition to architects and planners, artists and sociologists). Today the office is still strongly represented in the USA with offices in Los Angeles, New York and Washington, DC .

The Northland Center in Detroit

In 1952 the implementation of his life's work began when he built his first shopping center in Northland near Detroit , in which visitors should no longer just shop but find all the functions of urban centers. This made him the inventor of the “shopping mall”, the epitome of American suburbanization , even though his visions went in a completely different direction than that dominated by car traffic: He saw his mall - with theaters and cultural facilities - as the center of a dense urban space , as a kind of improved downtown, which should be surrounded by dense housing developments, parks and sports facilities.

The Southdale Center

As early as 1956, his first covered “shopping mall” was built in Southdale, south of Minneapolis . In addition to shops, it also contained a school, a lecture hall and an ice rink. He was able to implement his actual vision in parts three years later: In Kalamazoo , an average American small town, two blocks of the main street Burdick Street were closed to traffic in order to clear the space for a mall in the city center. With this, Gruen succeeded in breaking with the gradual submission of American urban space to the demands of motorized individual transport; but his vision went even further. In view of the rapid suburbanization and motorization of American society, he predicted the major traffic collapse in city centers if the structural structures were not fully aligned with this development. His plan for Kalamazoo City therefore (like the previous plan for Fort Worth , which soon became the prototype of all urban renewal plans, and later the plan for Fresno ) provided for a ring road with large-scale parking around the city center and the greatest possible freedom from cars for the city center itself. In doing so, he must have still had the building of the center of his hometown Vienna in mind. Further extensive general plans followed

  • for the newly founded city of Valencia near Los Angeles with 200,000 inhabitants, which was also largely implemented.
  • for the transformation of Welfare Island into a model city with a functional and social mix, where all traffic would have been moved underground;
  • for Vienna, which has largely been implemented today.

In 1948 Gruen visited his hometown for the first time after the end of the war and from then on stayed in Vienna again and again. He maintained a well-known circle of friends, which included the future Federal President Heinz Fischer , Bernd Lötsch , environmental activist and later director of the Natural History Museum, the Science Minister of the Kreisky era, Hertha Firnberg , and Felix Slavik, long-time Vienna City Councilor for Finance and later Mayor of Vienna. Nevertheless, perhaps the most successful architect of the 20th century stood before a court in Vienna in 1967: The Vienna Chamber of Architects revoked Gruen from the professional title of “architect” because he “failed” to complete his studies in National Socialist Vienna. 2010, after the TV documentary “Der Gruen Effekt . Victor Gruen and the Shopping Mall ”, the current President of the Chamber, Georg Pendl, awarded Gruen posthumously the symbolic honorary membership as a gesture of reparation.

In 1968, Gruen founded the “ Victor Gruen Center for Environmental Planning ” company in Los Angeles and withdrew the majority from the “Victor Gruen Associates”. In the same year Gruen and his fourth wife finally returned to Vienna, where in 1973 he founded the sister company “ Center for Environmental Planning ”. He died on February 14, 1980 in Vienna.

meaning

Anyone who associates the name Victor Gruen exclusively with the establishment of large temples of consumption is misinterpreting it. The creation of spaces that invite people to stay and consume was one of his great concerns; The work-friendly world of men should be contrasted with the counterpart of the consumer- friendly world of women, the loss of the comfort of the Viennese consumer worlds ( coffee houses ) was difficult for him in his early years in the USA. For Victor Gruen, however, it was about more than just promoting consumption in a car-friendly world. His main interest was the creation of a livable environment for humans.

  • With his concept of the covered, car-free center, in view of the historical experience of increasing urban sprawl and destruction of (public) street space, he wanted to reclaim mixed urban structures within walking distance for use by pedestrians and optimize them with additional weather protection. In the USA, where the grown historic old town, which invites you to stay and enables the residents to identify with their city, with a few exceptions does not exist, he was concerned with the construction of multifunctional centers that, in addition to shopping opportunities, also public and social Facilities include creating such “city centers” first. Gruen was an avowed opponent of the unifunctional center, i.e. the pure shopping center.
  • In addition, he also called for a fundamental realignment of settlement planning in order to reduce the need for mechanical aids to a minimum.
  • The necessary distances would have to be covered with fast, energy-saving and cheap collective transport.
  • The urban environment must invite people to stay and offer high quality.
  • And ultimately, all technical services should be so effectively separated from the human area of ​​life by architectural refinements that they can simply no longer be perceived.

Victor Gruen can therefore be regarded as a pioneer of the “ compact cities ” or the “ city ​​of short distances ”. He also wrote down his ideas in hundreds of articles and numerous books. In the “Charter of Vienna” which he wrote and which he published in his book “The Survival of Cities”, he formulated the principles of environmentally friendly urban planning geared towards human needs. In view of the epoch of his work, it should come as no surprise that his visions failed in the implementation and that his plans ultimately only consisted of the idea of ​​optimizing the spatial coincidence of supply and demand in a motorized world .

Victor Gruen's work does not only live on on the North American continent. In Green's native city of Vienna, his thoughts flowed into the first urban development plan , which included the creation of the first pedestrian zone in Kärntner Straße. The numerous pedestrian zones that emerged in cities in the FRG in the 1970s and 1980s can also be traced back to Victor Gruen or Vienna as a model.

Awards

Fonts

  • Victor Gruen: Letter to the state of Michigan . 1950.
  • Victor Gruen: Upjohn Village: A complete community development . 1950.
  • Victor Gruen: Circular store for traffic flow. Chain Store Age . 1951.
  • Victor Gruen: Regional shopping centers and civilian defense . 1951.
  • Victor Gruen: Cityscape and landscape . 1955.
  • Victor Gruen: The heart of our cities: The urban crisis . 1964.
  • Victor Gruen: Russian report . 1964. (?)
  • Victor Gruen: Downfall and rebirth of city cores on both sides of the Atlantic . 1972.
  • Victor Gruen: Centers for the urban environment: Survival of the cities . 1973.
    German-language edition: The survival of cities Ways out of the environmental crisis . Vienna 1973, ISBN 3-217-00491-4 .
  • Victor Gruen: Shopping centers in the USA
  • Victor Gruen, Larry Smith: Shopping towns USA: The planning of shopping centers . 1960.
  • Victor Gruenbaum, E. Krummeck. Letter to Ruth Goodhue . 1943. (?)
  • Victor Gruenbaum: Shopping center . 1943.
  • Victor Gruenbaum: A report concerning store design in the year 2000 .

literature

  • Anette Baldauf: Shopping Town. Victor Gruen, the Cold War and the shopping mall . In: Eurozine May 25, 2007
  • Anette Baldauf, Dorit Margreiter: The Green Effect. montage 8, Wien / Vienna 2006.
  • Malcolm Gladwell : Annals of Commerce: The Terrazzo Jungle - Fifty years ago, the mall was born. America would never be the same. In: The New Yorker , March 14, 2004. Article online , accessed March 9, 2014
  • M. Jeffrey Hardwick: Mall Maker: Victor Gruen, Architect of an American Dream , University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia 2003, ISBN 978-0-8122-3762-7 .
  • Barbara Mautner: Giving back the city to the Viennese. Victor Gruen (1903-1980) and Viennese urban planning: Urban planning practice in the late 20th century . Diploma thesis at the University of Vienna, 2012. online version

Movie

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ List of all decorations awarded by the Federal President for services to the Republic of Austria from 1952 (PDF; 6.9 MB)
personal data
SURNAME Gruen, Victor
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Victor David Grünbaum
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian urban planner and architect
DATE OF BIRTH July 18, 1903
PLACE OF BIRTH Vienna
DATE OF DEATH February 14, 1980
Place of death Vienna