The Gruen vision
Victor Gruen
promoted them as the new villages, places that replicated the
qualities found in small, historic market towns. They were described
as pleasant, agreeable places free of vehicles, like the old town
centres of Europe; with spaces where folk could shop, socialise and
sip coffee in a humane and sensitive place shaped for
people. It was a reaction to the congested city centres of the
fifties and sixties that saw the old buildings demolished to be
replaced with the new 'International'-imaged structures that promoted
slick height and gleaming glass. The inner city was being transformed
into a no-man's-land, with busy, congested streets framed by stark,
anonymous masses that concealed entries and denied any gesture
towards public convenience. The city was interested in statements on
streets that were a-buzz with polluting traffic seeking speedy
thoroughfares and convenient places to park. This was the period of
freeway building throughout the world. Wilbur Smith had prepared the
report that would see Brisbane's CBD separated from its river with a
massive freeway built over the water. It aimed to solve the
inner-city traffic problems, but only created new concerns.
Vehicle-free spaces
Civic place was
being destroyed by the blind enthusiasm for the new. Grand old
structures were demolished overnight without a thought for any future
but that perceived for the moment. Little wonder that the dream of a
quiet, green and sunny shopping centre, where there would be no
vehicles to fight, or glass towers to blind, became so alluring.
Peace and convenience at last. One could use the new freeways to get
to 'Nirvana' quickly and efficiently. This was the era of time and motion studies too. Victor Gruen promoted his vision of a shopping
centre so successfully that the model has been repeated throughout
the world: but have things changed for the better?
Pedestrian places between retail outlets
It seems that like
most grand visions, it is the cheapest and simplest, the most
simplistic version of their aspects that proliferate. Complexities
and subtleties are abandoned. One can look at le Corbusier's
Marseilles apartment block, Unité d'habitation, to understand this. His design managed
sound separation, provided through ventilation for each unit with
different aspects, and offered social options for shopping and
recreation. The world is now full of seemingly similar high-rise
apartment blocks that use the model as a broad diagram only,
providing just the basic needs in structure and space for residents
as cheaply as possible. Anything more is considered a waste of money.
The social impacts of these places have been seen in the Pruitt-Igoe development in St. Louis, Missouri that had to be demolished; and in similar
developments in London and Glasgow, and many other cities that hope to
be demolished if they have not already been flattened.
Has the Gruen
shopping centre vision suffered likewise? Such shopping centres now
litter the fringes of nearly every town and city in the world. They,
like the apartment block concept, have mostly been built to
incorporate the ideal as economically as possible. One does not want
too much expensive exuberance for an ideal when 'near enough' will do
and the profits will be better. Who'll know the difference? So it is
that we get shopping areas shaped for private mass commerce located
in city precincts to suit the shopping centre rather than the town or the
street. Instead of spaces with European town centre quality, we get
arcades set out as mazes, filled with shop fronts blaring and
blazing, collected and categorised for commercial efficacy. The
internal 'squares' become promotional areas for entertainment or
sprawling eating areas. Rarely is the place made for simple social
convenience and enjoyment: to let folk enjoy just being there. Hype
is used everywhere to tell visitors what is expected of them, how to
act, and where: getting and spending is good! The ad hoc and informal
has no place in this hyped economy.
But this is the
interior. The exterior is more of a problem. Gruen envisaged these
centres free of vehicles, but this was only after patrons had driven
to them and parked. By attracting more and more people with the idea
of a pleasant shopping precinct, an event that is now called a
shopping 'experience' – see:
http://voussoirs.blogspot.com.au/2015/11/architectural-language-problem-of-hype.html
, the Gruen model had to provide more than adequate car parking
around the idyllic, vehicle-free inner zone. It is this external,
brutal blandness that creates the problems for these centres. Some
effort is made internally to recreate an 'urban village' feel, but
externally, the whole relationship with place is forgotten. These
centres are self-centred: they do nothing for the regions around
them. They turn their backs to their neighbours and offer literally
nothing for the urban character of place. They are desert islands and
can be seen to be this in the cityscape with their different scales,
sizes, services and materials.
Being commercial
enterprises, they are constructed as economically as possible. If an
effort has to be made to cajole patrons in some seemingly sensitive manner,
then money is spent internally, tarting up the spaces to make them
appear 'attractive' – different is good enough. Externally we see
blank sheds, a collection of buildings so large that they create
their own scale in the pattern of place. They arrogantly ignore every
quality of city/town character that the original vision saw as being
so attractive. The Gruen-styled centres sought and promoted qualities
of shopping space found so alluring in the old Medieval towns, but
when it came to constructing these centres, no
consideration was given to their broader context, their neighbours. They were
and are just interiors, nothing more – stage sets; places for
performances. The sad irony is that the vision based its dream on
beautiful civic place, but the implementation of this concept
completely ignored the city it was to service, its urban character
and structure: its place. The land was purchased, cleared and the
centres were built – from inside out. The exterior areas only had
to offer sufficient, convenient car parking to provide easy access to
the interiors, nothing more. The buildings only had to provide
shelter to the designer spaces and walls for signage. This is all
that was done, to the detriment of the related regions and their contexts.
The interiors all look and feel identical - open, light interiors with various levels and escalators
A couple of smaller
centres have attempted to integrate into their regions, but these
have their own problems. In Lerwick, the small Toll Clock Shopping
Centre uses the shed image of waterside places to try to match its
context. Here we see a set of gable forms stretch across a car
parking space. These masses are clad in brightly coloured metal and trimmed likewise,
to look 'industrial' like the sheds around the harbour nearby. It
helps a little, but the open car parking spaces change the scale of
place, and make the illusion a more difficult pretense to accept without any questions.
Toll Clock Shopping Centre, Lerwick
Toll Clock Shopping Centre from the harbour
Toll Clock Shopping Centre car park
The shopping centre
in Tórshavn in the Faeroes
attempts a similar disguise. It breaks its large mass down by
fragmenting the roof line into a set of gables too. It is difficult
to read as a clustering of small sheds, because the building mass is
so large. Tórshavn is a
gathering of small buildings. Even the big hotels that have been
constructed in town have tried to disguise their mass. Here different
finishes and wall colourings try to cheat the eye – usually
unsuccessfully. One wonders if good, honest expression might not be
better than a failure to cheat, when one sees the large mass
highlighted by the ineffective camouflage.
Tórshavn
Shopping centre, Tórshavn
Harbourside building, Tórshavn
Typical 'Gruen' interior space
These efforts to
manage shopping centre impacts only point out the serious problem
that the 'sheltered, internal streets for people' vision has created.
Sadly, it is a vision that suffers from its own inherent problems.
Internally the large shopping centres frequently fail to express
anything but private place. These 'public' areas never are. There is
something essential in a city that holds a vibrancy in its necessary
diversity, differences that are there because there are essential
divergences everywhere, on all levels and in all details. In shopping
centres, there is the one owner/manager over-viewing and policing
everything, making demands on all tenants and patrons under the
illusion of offering the freedom of the town to all – the right to
walk, saunter or to run down a street in a city or town whenever, in
my public space, the only shared space that I can call mine in the city or
town: see -
http://voussoirs.blogspot.com.au/2015/02/the-importance-of-street.html
The Gruen vision can
be seen to hold a fatal flaw in its concept that offers false hopes
and illusions. It might seek to provide a more wholesome environment
for shoppers, but in doing so, developers have adapted matters to
maximise profits as exteriors are economically and blandly clad, and interiors are decorated
just enough to make it seem as though a caring effort has been made.
The world has seen enough of these places to know that they are
careless of matters urban and social. They strip the heart out of
little places, starving the old centres of vital energy, turning them
into ghost streets. Armidale, in New South Wales, Australia comes to
mind here. The old department store, a beautifully detailed Art
Nouveau decorated building, stands starved of activity like the
eastern end of the main street that has been a mall for many years. A
large shopping centre has been constructed on the western end of the
town, complete with large parking areas below. The drive-in
simplicity of mass shopping leaves the poetry of the local street
struggling for its rhythm. The new kills the old; it does not
reinforce any of the vitality that was once there, qualities that the Gruen vision saw as its
inspiration.
What can be done
about this? One knows instinctively that 'tarting up' exteriors by
remodelling them or camouflaging them in any way will do nothing but
distract from the core problems of scale, urban structure and city
vitality. Maybe it will not be until our modes of transport have been reformed that the era of the 'Gruen' shopping centre will meet
its demise. Once the extremes of car ownership turn out to be seriously problematical, and other more friendly, accessible modes and scales of public
transport have been developed, perhaps fully automated and integrated, then the city and town might regain
its importance, its civic respect and richness. This cannot happen quickly enough;
but it might. Cities and towns are resilient. They have survived the
onslaught of the Gruen vision. Now we need to spend more time aiding
place rather than destroying it with false visions and careless,
crude illusions that never evade the scrutiny of the eye or tentacles of the
feeling body. This change will demand a new transparency; a new
honesty, free of hype and commercial interests. This is the everyday
world that we need to care for much more, for we are involved with
the everyday, everyday.
Faversham, Kent - market town
Commercial Street, Lerwick
P.S.
Yet another sad
irony is that while the Gruen vision promoted the rich vitality and
diversity of old streets, it has turned out to do otherwise. When
travelling the world, one soon learns that shopping centres are the
same everywhere – exactly the same. Be they in Dublin or Dubai,
Glasgow, Geneva or Goa, Penang or Paisley, they are identical. The
richness inherent in the Medieval public street that can still be
seen in, say, Commercial Street in Lerwick in the Shetland Islands,
and, more informally in the souks of Dubai, disappears in the rigours
of the privately owned shopping centres that, no matter how hard they
might try to replicate old forms and features, fail to provide
anything but corporate place, with corporate identification and
corporate security, with corporate, international tenants promoting
their wares complete with their corporate brandings. A street has a
life and significance that dies in the hands of any one manager.
Cities and towns discover this when councils decide to implement
their civic visions too rigidly. Diversity needs to be complete in
every aspect if it is to be revealed in all of its true depth and
richness, not as a pretend game of decoration and disguise. So a city
needs big and small; old and new; insignificant and grand; clean and dirty;
cheap and expensive; every variation possible if it is to embody the
subtleties of life that made Gruen so enthusiastic about his places
for people: but when implemented, these Gruen centres provide places
that are not for people, and never will be. They are desert places,
voids around an 'oasis' stage set in an urban complexity that now
needs healing.
NOTE:
The city hills and the scar
This piece was
stimulated by the scarring appearance of a development in Sydney's cityscape. In amongst the suburban settlements on the rolling hills
behind Freshwater beach, just north of Manly, there was what one might call a scar, something uniquely awkward in
scale, colour, form and massing, completely different to everything else that
could be seen from the remarkable vantage point that provided a 360 degree vista of the city. What was this unusual urban mark on the land?
Detailed view of the scar
The general scale, texture and colour of suburban Sydney
It turned out to be
Warringah Mall. A couple of days later we visited the mall as
shoppers. Entering the complex was a rude insult. Access ways through
and around tight car parking areas and service yards eventually led
us to a dark, grim and grimy car parking space from which we were
guided along narrow painted paths to grubby tunnels and through fire doors
into the decorated mall spaces cluttered with an extravaganza of
shops. It was a depressing experience, just as the civic appearance
of the complex was in the city hillscape. There was no concern at all
for the urban context of this exotic interior. It merely forced its own
demands onto its neighbours and the city as a whole. This was not a centre that seemed to care for people or place.
The shopping centre marks its presence with its stark difference
Sydney, Australia - city views reveal a relatively even texturing and colouring
THE GRUEN EFFECT
Retail spaces are
designed for impulse shopping. When you go into a store looking for
socks and come out with a new shirt, it's only partly your fault.
Shops are trying to look so beautiful, so welcoming, the items so
enticingly displayed and in such vast quantity, that the consumer
will start buying compulsively.
This is the Gruen
Effect.
The Gruen Effect is
named after Victor Gruen, born in Vienna in 1904 to a Jewish family.
Gruen, born Viktor Grünbaum,
left Austria in 1938 for New York city, where he made a name for
himself designing shops and retail spaces. This was a particular
challenge during the lean years of the late 30s. People had no money.
They just wouldn't go into shops. However Gruen figured out how to
lure customers inside with amazing appealing windows displays.
Was this cunning trickery the beginning of the dream to create false hopes with illusions on a larger scale?
NOTE
14 February 2016
NOTE
14 February 2016
In The Guardian, 14 February 2016, Mark Townsend has written a report titled Will Self joins London ‘mass trespass’ over privatisation of public space: see -
This is precisely the problem with 'Gruen' space.
21 February 2016
