Victor Gruen's Retail Therapy: Exiled jewish communities and the invention of the american shopping mall as a postwar ideal

Abstract

This article examines the role of emigre architect Victor Gruen in advancing a social-democratic ideology that would find an unlikely application in the context of consumer capitalism in the United States. It argues that Gruen was able to channel the ideals of social democracy into his vision of the shopping centre, intended as a recreation of the best aspects of urbanity in a suburban 'desert' that lacked any community centre. The article focuses on the formation of Gruen's values in interwarVienna and his early experiences in the US in the late 1930s and early 1940s, where he embraced his identity as a Jewish refugee by managing a theatre troupe of exiled Viennese, and where he established himself as an architect and designer in part through his contacts in the community of emigre Jews in New York.