historium:Inside the first mall in the USA, Southdale Mall (1956), which Frank Lloyd Wright visited
historium:Inside the first mall in the USA, Southdale Mall (1956), which Frank Lloyd Wright visited and said “had all the evils of the village street and none of its charms”Southdale ended up inspiring so many copy cats, that the inventor of the modern mall, Victor Gruen, ending up regretting his creation and went back to his homeland of Vienna. You see, malls we never supposed to end up the way they did.Victor just underestimated the pure insanity of American automobile culture.Many of you would be surprised to know that the inventor of what became the capitalist hellscape of the modern mall was actually a Jewish immigrant, and a devout socialist. He fled the Nazis when they invaded Austria in 1938, and along with him, brought leftist ideals of how architecture could be used to solve societal ills. Malls were originally designed to be primarily social gathering places, not large businesses. In Victor Gruen’s vision, the mall would have brought municipal services, social events, schools, apartments, basic goods and local shops all within the same roof or area– much in the same way as a medieval town square. The idea was to banish the need for cars all together, so that people could spend more time connecting with each other instead of driving.Unfortunately, the growth of suburbia grew like kudzu, making Victor Gruen’s dream short-lived. Americans were spending more time in their cars than ever before. Where malls should have put up apartments, they put up parking lots. The modern mall simply became an empty vessel for American consumerism, rather than the town square it could have been. So Frank Lloyd Wright can suck it. Yes, Southdale is ugly. But the dream of what it could have represented is rather beautiful. -- source link
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