For better or worse, architects Daniel Burnham and Victor Gruen altered the American communal realm.

BY MAX PAGE

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Mall Maker: Victor Gruen, Architect of an American Dream
By M. Jeffrey Hardwick; University of Pennsylvania Press, $29.95

Daniel H. Burnham: Visionary Architect and Planner
By Kristen Schaffer; Rizzoli, $95

On Christmas Eve, Tennessee's Mall of Memphis earned the dubious honor of being the largest shopping mall ever to close its doors. If, years from now, we come to recognize this closing as a turning point in the history of American retailing, it will mark the end of an era that began partly in the late 19th century with the great Chicago architect Daniel Burnham and peaked in the 1950s with a socialist designer from Vienna, Victor Gruen. These men are the subjects of two new books that push us to think about how to create engaging spaces in our sprawled cities.

Victor Gruen may be the most tragic figure in American architecture. More-famous architects had their personal tragedies, but in the disparity between what he hoped to accomplish and what he actually unleashed, Gruen is unique. An Austrian who came of age amidst 1920s Viennese socialism, Gruen (1903­1980) became the prophet of the shopping mall in the United States, proclaiming the good news that malls could roll back what he termed the "commercial slum" of the suburbs and become new community centers. Gruen shifted from producing Broadway plays to spicing up Fifth Avenue storefronts, designing department stores along commercial strips, and creating prototypes for the enclosed regional shopping mall on the fringes of Detroit (1954) and Minneapolis (1956). He insisted the mall would "fill the vacuum created by the absence of social, cultural and civic crystallization points in our vast suburban areas." He hoped to retain the reforming ideals of the Viennese socialism on which he had been reared, while abandoning the governmental mechanisms of achieving these goals. "This nearly utopian socialist dream," Hardwick writes, "would be built by American capitalists."

Instead it turned into a nightmare. The malls accelerated the flight of business from downtowns, failed to become true town centers, and heightened dependency on the automobile. Gruen himself did a reverse commute back downtown. He offered grand visions for revitalized central business districts, proposing, for example, that the core of Fort Worth be turned into a mixed-used pedestrian zone. The plan seems like an apology for having created a monster that undermined true urbanism. It was never implemented. In 1968, in an admission of defeat, Gruen retreated to still-vibrant Vienna. There he designed European shopping malls while castigating the bastardization of his designs by American builders.

If Gruen's malls were among the defining buildings of the second half of the 20th century in America, the tall building that Daniel Burnham pioneered dominated the first half. Although Burnham (1846­1912) didn't live long enough to use technologies that would allow for the true skyscrapers of the 1920s and 1930s, he and partner John Wellborn Root designed some of the first, and most beautiful, tall buildings—the Monadnock, Rookery, and Reliance buildings and Marshall Field store in Chicago; the Wanamaker store in Philadelphia; Union Station in Washington, D.C.; and to many the most lyrical, the Flatiron Building in New York City. In many of their early buildings Burnham and Root designed variations on a block of offices around a large light court, which solved the problem of dark interiors. This also allowed them to create glorious two-story atriums, in essence a new form of public space. Intended to be passageways between streets as well as new retail hubs that would generate revenue for the buildings, they were the unwitting precursors to Gruen's enclosed malls.

Author Kristen Schaffer at times has an ax to grind, which can get in the way of a broader evaluation of Burnham. The book is a point-by-point defense of his underappreciated importance in architectural history. The author challenges criticisms that she believes have sullied his reputation—for instance, that his firm was interested in merely recycling historical styles. Schaffer argues that critics have ignored his contribution to the evolution of that very modern form, the tall office building. But in describing his career building by building, the author only touches briefly on Burnham's greatest influence: his urban vision. As chief designer of the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Burnham was an originator of the City Beautiful movement. After the fair, he helped fashion that city's remarkable lakefront and in 1909 drafted the Chicago Plan, imagining how the city could be built. Burnham proposed marshaling governmental powers to create a vast communal sphere of boulevards and sidewalks, parks and cultural institutions, and public buildings—influencing other cities and remaining an inspiration to planners today. Ironically, it was Burnham, the builder of skyscrapers for capitalists, who understood better than Gruen that the force of capital had to be tempered by government, to create public spaces central to community life.

Max Page is associate professor of architecture and history at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and author of The Creative Destruction of Manhattan, 1900­1940.

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