Much has been written about Victor Gruen, the Austrian e'migre' who escaped Nazi-occupied Europe in 1938 and arrived in New York City with eight dollars in cash, a t-square, and no command of the English language.

 

Viktor David Grunbaum was born, in Vienna, Austria, on July 18, 1903. He attended the Advanced Division for Building Construction Technological Institute, in Vienna, and received a degree in architecture from the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts. He founded the firm Gruen & Krummeck (1932-1938), in Vienna, and was employed by Morris Ketcham Architects, in New York City (1938-1939). 

 

From these humble beginnings sprang an illustrious 39-year career in the design of retail structures, which got underway with his creation of fashionable Fifth Avenue boutiques and work on renovating several Manhattan department stores. One of Gruen's early commissions was for the design of a branch of Los Angeles' Milliron's department store, in 1948.

 

 

Milliron's Westchester, a freestanding department store, welcomed first shoppers in March 1949. The Late Moderne-style structure was considered groundbreaking in its day.

Photo from Gruen Associates
 

Gruen formed Gruen Associates, a Los Angeles-based architectural firm, in 1951. Commissions for several office buildings and apartment complexes followed. He was was made a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects, the highest honor given by that organization, in April 1962.

SUBURBAN SPRAWL

At the close of WW II, America, after years of depression and global conflict, was poised for major economic expansion. Virtually all this growth would occur in new, outlying suburbs. The regional shopping center would become the center of commerce in this reconfigured landscape.

Gruen had many innovative concepts that were utilized in constructing these new-style, suburban centers. He also had a great deal of input in the urban renewal projects that resulted from America's shift away from downtown-centered commerce.

The best known of his concepts -The Gruen Transfer- involved trying to increase consumer spending by manipulating shoppers to do impulse buying. According to Gruen, this could be accomplished via unconscious influences of lighting, ambient sound and music, visual detail of storefronts, mirrored or polished surfaces and climate control of interior spaces.

CITY CENTERS

Gruen also believed that America's central cities, which had been decimated by suburbanization, could be revitalized by constructing expressway loops around downtown areas, routing automobile traffic into parking garages and creating pedestrian-only zones, free of vehicular traffic, on previously-existing streets.

His first downtown redevelopment plan was commissioned for Fort Worth, Texas in 1956, but never carried out. Michigan's open-air KALAMAZOO MALL became Gruen's first completed center city project in August 1959. Then came FULTON STREET MALL (1964), in Fresno, California, K STREET MALL (1969), in Sacramento, and FORT STREET MALL (1969) in Honolulu. These projects did not fully implement Gruen's ideas, as only pedestrian malls were built. 

 

Gruen's Master Plan for Fort Worth, Texas advocated rebuilding the city
center as a pedestrian-only zone. Utility functions, such as package
deliveries and refuse removal, would be relocated to a system of
underground tunnels. Although considered visionary and innovative, the
Gruen Plan was never implemented.
Drawing from Gruen Associates