99% Invisible - 163- The Gruen Effect

Episode Date: May 6, 2015

Retail spaces are designed for impulse shopping. When you go to 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 … Continue reading →

This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. Revolved on it. You go to the store for a pair of socks and come out with a mega pack of soda. You go out to get shampoo and come back with a fancy razor. It's hard to stick to what's on your list. I challenge you to go to IKEA and leave with only the thing for which you game. Just try to buy a lamp without buying a cutting board. It can't be done. You absolutely knew this, but retail spaces are designed to do this to you. Producer Avery Truffleman. The store is trying to look so beautiful, so welcoming, the item so enticingly displayed in such vast quantity that you cannot help but be drawn in, and then drawn towards something

you don't need. This is the Grooan Effect. The Grooan Effect, or sometimes called the Grooan Transfer, is that moment when you walk into a store and the design of the store is so overwhelming and dazzling that you begin mindlessly consuming. The Grooan Effect is named after Victor Grooan. So who was Grooan? is named after Victor Grooan. So who was Grooan?

He's a complicated, complex, contradictory guy. Jeff Hardwick wrote the biography of Victor Grooan, who was born Victor Grooanbaum. Born in Vienna in 1904, and he is Jewish in Vienna, leaves in 38. Good call, Grooanbaum. And makes his way eventually to New York City. Once in New York, Grun made a name for himself designing shops

and retail spaces. And this was a particular challenge during the lean years of the late 30s. People had no money. They just wouldn't go into shops at all. But Grun figured out how to lure people inside, basically by using amazingly appealing window displays.

You would go into these window display areas, look at jewelry or handbags or chocolates, and then you'd be tempted and lured into the store. I mean, that's the Groen effect. Groen argued that good design equaled good profits. And he quates those as one to one. If you do more, people are going to stay there longer and spend more money. Grue and started making store fronts all over the country.

And he moved from New York to Los Angeles in 1941. Grue and was from the beautiful city of Vienna, which is lined with shops and greenery and places to gather. He saw how most Americans were just riding around in their cars all the time, cut off from the city and from each other. And he knew this problem was even worse in the suburbs. The suburbs lacked what sociologist Ray Oldenburg calls third places. Think of home as your primary place, work as your second place, and that third place

is where you go to build community to hang out, to simply feel connected. Groen wanted to give the American suburbs that third place. The image of living in closer communication with other people, the image of having the possibility from walk to one place to another. That's archival footage of Groen from the University of Wyoming. The image of participating in events outside of your own little house has become a desirable factor. Victor Groen imagined designing an environment full of greenery and shops, an indoor plaza, a modern forum, an island of connection in the middle of the sprawl,

one that would only be accessible to pedestrians. Because, oh man, Victor Groen hated cars. He ran and raves against cars continually. One technology event has swamped us. That is the advent of the rubber wheeled vehicle, the private cars, the trucks, the trailer, as means of mass transportation. And their threat to human life and hence is just as great as that of the exposed sewer. It's hard to understand them with the tape hiss in the accent, but what Groen is saying

there is. The threat of cars to human life and health is as great as the exposed sewer. So Groen's objective was to get people to park their cars far away from these third places and walk and stroll within them. As Groen saw it, his structure would be an architectural panacea. It would remedy environmental, commercial, and sociological problems with the creation of a single building. And so Gruen presented his solution for America, the shopping mall. Gruen actually wanted the shopping mall to be more than just shops. He wants them to be mixed use. He wants apartments and offices or medical centers

attached to the shopping center. He makes cases to have childcare facilities, libraries, bombshellters, a whole range of different functions. And Groen dreamed and wrote about being closed shopping center way before he ever built one. Until he finally lands a commission for the very first indoor climate controlled shopping center. In Adina, Minnesota, a place not known for its welcoming climate. Southdale represents an entirely new and dramatic concept in retail merchandise. Southdale Center opened in 1956,

and it was the mother of all shopping malls. Seriously, ruined subsequent malls were all mostly based off this original adina design. When he's doing the first enclosed shopping mall, Southdale, and in a dinominic soda, but grew in really emphasizes and what the media ends up celebrating is this massive center court. This court has enclosed in skylighter,

so that not only the stores, but the shopping sidewalks. In fact, the whole area in front of the stores is air conditioned and temperature controlled, a year-round climate of 72 degrees. For Gruin, he's creating a town square. Southdale Center wasn't quite mixed use, like Groen imagined. People didn't live in it, and something like a daycare center or a post office couldn't afford that rent. But Southdale did have local shops of all kinds, and plenty of shoppers. Southdale, tomorrow's main street, today.

But from the outside, Southdale Center is not much to look at. I mean, it looks like a mall. It's a ominous, amorphous boxy shape. In designing these shopping malls, Grewin ended his razzle dazzle storefronts and window displays. Southdale hardly has exterior windows at all. He moves away from the original concept that in some ways they're going to attract by being ostentatious.

The drawn now is what's inside them all. In Grooons mind, it should have pretty much a blank facade, no signage on it, and then you enter that space and then you walk into the shopping center and that's that sort of transformational grue and transfer moment. Molls are designed as these sort of suburban pilgrimage sites, which of course you have to drive to. It's a commitment.

You're driving 20-30 minutes, you're parking, you're getting out of your car, you're walking in. Grue and knew that Americans love to drive. So the mall was as compromised. You had to walk and stroll once you were inside, but the customers could drive over. So he just hates the automobile, but he never will acknowledge that he's

creating these shopping centers, which are largely only accessible through cars. Ruin was right. Americans loved driving to his malls. He got commissions for them all over the country. But over time, Gruin sees that interacting these malls, these tiny suburban cities, he's helping to drain the real cities.

And so for a while, Gruin shifts his focus to urban planning. We want to rescue our cities, which because we haven't neglected our threatening to go to pieces. And so Groen ends up being involved in urban renewal projects, where he draws directly on some of the lessons learned in his suburban shopping malls and proposes bringing them back downtown. Municipalities hire gruin and associates to make their downtowns more like malls. Gruin turns city centers into pedestrian-only spaces, full of public art and greenery and lined with shops.

He made plans for Boulder, Fresno, Fort Worth, Kalamazoo. Actually, his plan for Kalamazoo became the first outdoor pedestrian shopping mall in the US. He even had a concept to turn Fifth Avenue into a pedestrian mall. He gets Manhattan to close down Fifth Avenue for a couple weeks as a test. But a city's downtown is not a mall. It's not so easily quote unquote fixed, not so perfectly designed and controlled. Cities weren't going to become the pleasant sterile shopping environments

that Groen wanted them to be. After the riots of the 60s, he is shocked and sort of taken a back by those and was very much unprepared for them. And I think that may have been somewhat of his reason for the retreat to Vienna. In 1968, Groen moved from Los Angeles back to Vienna. Back to the Greenery and Plazas. He had been trying to imitate. But he could not escape his own creation. There's a shopping mall that's being built on the edge of Vienna. And he points to that as how that shopping mall is destroying downtown Vienna.

In Groen's mind, Vienna was already perfectly planned. It didn't need a mall like the broken American suburbs did. As he saw it, his original vision had been completely skewed. After being in Vienna about 10 years, he gives a speech and writes a paper where he says, I refuse to pay alimoni for these bastard developments. Victor Groen, the mall maker, became the foremost mall critic. And meanwhile, America's love affair with malls continued. Did you want to press the mall?

It's a pretty girl like you doing sitting alone in the middle of this money you make to consumerism. I know I remember in my own experience growing up in New Jersey when the first mall opened anywhere near me when I was in high school. This is Ellen Dunham Jones. She's a professor of architecture and urban design at Georgia Tech. It was cool to go to the mall, but I mean literally it was air conditioned. My home wasn't air conditioned, my school wasn't air conditioned.

Today, most of us are spending our days and our nights in completely thermally controlled environments. A lot of us are craving being able to be outdoors. In recent decades, our tastes have veered away from climate controlled environments and away from climate-controlled environments and away from the indoor mall. Mall construction actually peaked in 1990. It's been declining ever since, and by 2006, is really the last brand new kind of standard

conventional mall that's been built in the U.S. And a new product has entered the scene, a kind of shopping center that the ICSC, the International Council of Shopping Centers, calls a Lifestyle Center. Lifestyle centers started appearing in the 90s and they tend to be open air, so you don't have that roof anymore. But you have a lot of boutiques and a lot more restaurants. Lifestyle centers are malls disguised as main streets. And even though they're full of chain stores, lifestyle centers are sunny and walkable and bustling,

and kind of what Victor grew and imagined. And some of the old-style indoor shopping malls are being repurposed. Several of them are being retrofitted into Hispanic community centers. Like in Plaza Fiesta outside of Atlanta. A lot of the stores have been cut up into much smaller mom and pop, small shops, selling Western wear, selling considerate dresses. Plaza Fiesta also has a steady events calendar of performances.

In this too was kind of what grew and imagined. These sort of community malls are truly places to gather and spend money in the shell of the failed design. Most people architectural historians especially, they grew and was a horrible architect. And you know, I can see where they're coming from. I mean, his exteriors of his building are uniformly boring. But for Grooen, that wasn't the point. It was the interiors that were really the point.

Those fountains, the cheesy statues, the elevator music piped in through all those speakers. Those are all part of the groan effect, and they helped turn shopping malls into spaces where we felt comfortable staying and spending time and money. A lot of the original indoor malls are abandoned now. Seriously, like some of them are growing weeds inside. There's a website that's become sort of a graveyard of deadmalls called deadmalls.com. Users can log on and submit stories of the deadmalls in their towns.

There are around 450 malls listed there, submitted as sort of oral histories. In particular, what's interesting, I think, about deadmalls.com is how nostalgic a lot of this is, and it does make sense. I mean, in so many suburban communities, the mall became the de facto town center. It was really the center of social life other than the school.

I would be very sad if all of Victor Groen's malls were demolished. We should certainly work to preserve at least one. The most famous mall in Minnesota may be the mall of America. With its roller coaster, it's zipline, it's aquarium and water park. But the most architecturally significant mall, its grandfather, is the one that's just a 12-minute drive away in a diner. Jeff Hardwick's book is called Mallmaker, Victor Groen architect of an American Dream. An Ellen Dunham Jones book is called Retro Fitting Suburban, special thanks to Claire Dordy for research help.

99% Invisible Was Produced This Week by Avery Truffleman with Katie Mingle Sam Greenspan and me Roman Mars. We are a project of 91.7KALW San Francisco and produced out of the offices of Arksign, an architecture and interiors firm in beautiful, downtown, mall-free, but lifestyle center rich Oakland, California. You can find the show and like the show on Facebook, you can follow my international travels on Twitter, at Roman Mars, we're on Tumblr, Spotify and Instagram too. But over 160 episodes of 99% Invisible are waiting for you at 99pi.org. Radio Tepi. From PRX.