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Victor Gruen
[Victor David Gruen (Viktor Grünbaum)] |
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* Vienna [Wien], Impero Austro-Ungarico [Österreichisch-Ungarische Monarchie], 18 Luglio 1903 |
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+ Vienna [Wien], Austria [Österreich], 14 Febbraio 1980 |
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americana |
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OPERE |
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Stati Uniti [United States]
» Detroit |
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Stati Uniti [United States]
» Fort Worth |
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APPUNTI |
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| Interrupted Modernity
Austria's Jewish Architects in Exile
Victor Gruen - Inventor of the shopping mall
Climbing the social ladder from poor immigrant to owner of a big company is an American dream. Victor Grün-baum made it come true. Born on 18 July 1903 in Vienna, he set up his first architectural office in 1932 in Vienna's city center. He rebuilt shops and apartments, including the home of the Austrian social democratic party's leader, Otto Bauer. The noted Austrian architect and architectural critic Otto Kapfinger thinks that Grünbaum's early designs for shops in Vienna had a determining influence on his later activities as an urban planner.
Grünbaum had many interests. In 1926, he founded the "Political Cabaret." He was a close friend of the left-wing writer Jura Soyfer, later a victim of the Nazis. With Soyfer, Grünbaum until 1938 wrote plays in which he made no secret of his socialist convictions.
In 1938, as a result of the Nazis' policy of "aryanisation," Grünbaum was down-graded to a humble employee in his own office. His new boss, formerly his subordinate, gave him the task of designing buildings and interiors for "Strength through Joy," the Nazi sports and tourism scheme for the masses. But he did not stay on that job very long, for soon he managed to emigrate.
In the United States, Grünbaum, who called himself Victor Gruen after 1943, very soon found a solid footing. In 1940, he settled in Los Angeles in order to redesign a big retailing company's chain of shops. Soon the commissions got bigger. In 1947, he designed his first large department store complete with a parking deck on the roof. His firm expanded at breathtaking speed. In 1949, with another émigré architect from Vienna, Rudolf Baumfeld, he founded "Victor Gruen Associates," a company which with a staff of 300 was to become one of the biggest architectural firms in the United States. It still exists with offices in Los Angeles, Washington and New York. From the beginning, Gruen's credo was to create an environment worth living in. "It is not much use to construct a building by itself. It is environmental architecture which today challenges our creativity. Architectural styles are secondary."
In 1954, Victor Gruen set new standards in Detroit with the first multifunctional shopping center. It was a town in itself where people could do more than just shop. Two years later, Gruen's first roofed-over shopping center was opened in Southdale, south of Minneapolis. The "shopping mall" was born. It consisted of shops, a school, an auditorium and a skating rink. Victor Gruen's idea was that malls should be a substitute for traditional city centers. People were to be given an opportunity to enjoy urban life in an environment protected from the weather.
From the late fifties, Victor Gruen more and more turned to urban planning. Today, his concept is more topical than ever: reduce the pressure of car traffic on inner city areas by establishing pedestrian precincts and city bus lines, without pushing essential city center functions out to the periphery. This was also the idea underlying Gruen's proposals of 1969 for the renewal of Vienna's city center. From 1973, Victor Gruen, with his fourth wife, again lived in Vienna, where he died on 14 February 1980. By that time, his invention, the shopping mall, had spread all over the world.
Friederich Kiesler - Visionary in architecture
Friedrich (or Frederick) Kiesler, architect, painter, sculptor and philosopher, was not a "typical" émigré. He had come to New York in 1926 in order to design an exhibition and a year later decided to remain in the United States. Born on 22 September 1890 in Czernowitz (now Chernovtsy, Ukraine), Kiesler studied architecture, painting and copper engraving in Vienna, but never took a degree. He organized exhibitions and designed stage settings. As early as the twenties, he started to work with new shapes. He developed surrealistic visions of elastic spaces for which he also created a philosophical basis.
In 1929, Kiesler was able to execute his first project in New York. Three years later, Philip Johnson, today the grand old man of modern architecture, featured Kiesler's Film Guide Cinema in his famous exhibition "Modern Architecture," in the context of which he invented the term "International Style." But this kind of functionalism was exactly what Kiesler did not want. For him, the ideal architectural form is the oval. "The eggshell is the most outstanding example known to us of a construction of the highest possible resistance. From this simple example we can learn something." Organic architecture fascinated Kiesler throughout his life.
In 1950, he conceived the "Endless House," a futuristic oval shape without visible supports or other static elements. Thereby he pursued a profoundly democratic ideal: houses were to be cheap, quick to build and flexible. But he was never able to translate his vision into reality.
A project of his which was actually executed was his "House of the Shrine" in Jerusalem. This museum, which houses the Dead Sea Scrolls, was opened in 1964.
In December 1965, Frederick Kiesler died. He was not only an artist and a visionary, for he also showed considerable practical foresight by leaving Austria eleven years before the Nazi occupation. It is only recently that Austria is slowly beginning to rediscover him.¨
http://www.austria.org/oldsite/jul00/exile.html |
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