The official representative of mall management has appeared out of nowhere. She is dressed in a crisp uniform; her security pass flaps from a lanyard around her neck as she strides purposefully towards us. In her left hand is a large walkie-talkie. She looks like she is about to hit someone. Unlike other mall-goers, she will not be influenced by midnight sales or flashy marketing, nor is she suffering urban dementia. There will be no impulse purchases on her way over to me and the small group of students who are discussing the finer points of mall architecture and how it is designed to create a landscape of consumer fantasy. I lower my eyes from her looming gaze and continue talking with my students.
Pedestrians first
The mall is an invention that completely backfired on its inventor, architect Victor Gruen, an Austrian Jew who emigrated to the United States in 1938 to avoid the looming hand of the Third Reich. He landed in New York with an architect’s degree, well-developed socialist politics and no English. He started to work as an architectural draughtsman.
As it turned out, Gruen had a knack for designing commercial retail property. He produced successful designs for boutique retailers on Fifth Avenue and Broadway and the clothing chain Grayson’s. By the time he moved to Los Angeles in the 1940s, he had branched out into broader urban planning work.
When he arrived in the US, he had been struck by the contrast between the pedestrian-friendly public places of Europe, designed centuries before the invention of the automobile, and those of his new home where the power of the car dictated the use of public space. He was a great believer that public urban landscapes need to revolve around pedestrians.
This led him to design the first suburban open-air shopping mall near Detroit in 1954. The idea arrived perfectly in time for the expansion and optimism of a post-war world and was quickly followed up by the indoor Southdale Mall in Edina, Minnesota, a 74,000sq m shopping complex that allowed the social interaction of a European street with the climate control and lighting of an indoor space impervious to the harsh North American winter. Gruen had invented the modern mall, and it was so wildly successful from a commercial point of view that the idea has endured for the past 70 years.
Left in the trail of this success was the fact that Gruen had originally intended the design to be for a much broader range of uses. He had envisaged that the mall would contain apartment buildings, schools, medical facilities, a park and even a lake. Gruen wanted to build a community, yet the commercial success of just one component of it shoved all the other vital bits aside as it bolted to the door with the money.
With the commercial success of the mall concept came the commissions and by the mid-1970s, Gruen’s architectural practice had completed more than 50 mall designs across the United States. The idea of the mall found a worldwide following. Modern city suburbs that were once defined by a landscape feature such as a hill or river came to be defined by their relationship to a mall.
Even in New Zealand, cities such as Tauranga have malls like Bay Fair and Fraser Cove that outcompete the well-established main street. To the casual observer, it may seem that many of these malls have sucked the central business districts dry, concentrating life in the suburbs, and adding to the rise of the car, cheap imports and the reign of mindless overconsumption. Most urban designers rate malls as the great plague of our time, because of their unmatched ability to destroy community life and small business, replacing them with a poor, franchised facsimile.
Gruen’s intention was for the mall to be a version of Austrian street life, a socialist dream and not a capitalist nightmare. By 1978, he had had enough of creating these monsters and, at a meeting of urban planners in London, was quoted as saying, “I refuse to pay alimony for those bastard developments. They destroyed our cities.” It was a Frankensteinian tale that haunted him for the rest of his life.
In a cruel twist of semantic architecture, Gruen’s name is now most associated with the “Gruen effect” and not with the design of great communities. The Gruen effect, or Gruen transfer as it is also known, describes the confused state in which unplanned consumption occurs. This is a product of mall design that keeps the customer visually disoriented in time and space. Heading in to buy a new pair of sneakers, you become so distracted that you leave the mall with a chai latte, a Michael Jackson T-shirt and a birthday card. You exit blinking in the harsh natural light with two hours gone, no idea where you parked your car and no sneakers. The lighting, temperature and orientation of the retail spaces are manipulated specifically for this purpose; this is one of the reasons why, when entering a mall, you get the feeling you could be anywhere. Whether it is Dallas, Dubai or Riccarton, the sameness can be anaesthetising. It is a true landscape of fantasy.
‘Who are you?’
Our own landscape of fantasy is about to end. I am discussing Gruen transfer with my small group of students, and the official representative from mall management is still striding purposefully towards us. The security card swinging on its lanyard and the walkie-talkie in her hand mean business.
“Excuse me,” she says gruffly. “What do you think you are doing?” She knows what we have been doing, because she has been watching us on the all-seeing eye of the security camera system for the last 10 minutes.
I try some good old-fashioned honesty. “We are studying Gruen transfer,” I say with a smile and the emphasis on the “we”.
She stares blankly before her anger reasserts itself. “Who are you?”
Honesty appears not to have worked, so I change tack. “We are from the Victor Gruen University of Urban Design,” I say.
Hers is a line of business in which neither humour nor fantasy is required. She again goes blank for a moment and then delivers her verdict. “Right, you can all get out … all of you,” she says, gesturing to the automatic doors behind the roar of the air curtain.
“Aren’t we on public property?” says one of my more assertive students.
“You are on mall property and you are not welcome here.” By this she means we do not look like we are going to buy stuff or fall victim to any tricks of commercial design.
Having seen us to the door, the mall manager disappears through a well-hidden door, from where she will no doubt keep her eye on the security cameras. The students are energised – getting thrown out of places mostly only happens in the movies.
They are twittering with excitement as we regroup on the footpath. The aggression of the mall manager means we are on to something, and the students sense this without my having to tell them; they are now ripe for learning of the best kind. We split up into groups of twos and threes and head around to the mall’s many other entrances, absorbing ourselves into the crowd and promising to meet up later.
We wander clandestinely in a world of fantasy, surreptitiously taking notes on corridor width, manipulated route choices and signage placement while losing track of time and buying things we don’t need.
Matt Vance is a Banks Peninsula writer and lecturer in design.
