Well, this is the day for names-no-one-seems-to-know-but-should. Here's another one for you: Victor Gruen. Never heard of him? Nope, probably not. Ever been to a shopping mall? Yes? Well, up until about 50 years ago, the shopping mall as Americans know and love(?) it-- huge blank box, oceans of parking lot, multiple levels with anchor stores at either end and chain-stores within along a central indoor promenade-- didn't exist. Victor Gruen, an urban planner and architect from Vienna, created it, and malls ever since have been built on his model.
Think about it: one man with his vision of an ideal America, a piece of architecture that would offer convenience for businessman and consumer alike and enrich people's communities and lives... and his model would completely change the face of American consumerism, if not in the way he expected. Later in life, when he saw what his "enclosed mall" concept created-- the rampant consumerism, the destruction of local businesses, the suburban sprawl-- he became disillusioned with the American dream. He left the U.S. for his home country of Austria, only to discover that America had gotten there first. There was a new mall just south of his hometown of Vienna, putting local shops out of business and sucking away the city's charm and life. He died February 14, 1980, barely two years after moving back home.
There's a new book out about him (actually, it came out at the end of last year, but I've just started seeing pub alerts about it now) entitled Mall Maker: Victor Gruen, Architect of an American Dream. Go read, it's fascinating, and a little heartbreaking-- the New Yorker (3/15/04 issue) has a good article about him.
My other new thing of the day isn't a book *yet,* but I hope it soon will be. Amir Nayef Toma al-Sayegh is a retired Iraq soldier who makes his living these days as a translator. He translates auto repair manuals from English into Arabic for Iraqi mechanics. Since the American invasion last year, he's also been documenting and translating the more than 1,700 pieces of commentary he's found on the walls of post-Saddam Hussein Baghdad in the form of graffiti. Under Saddam, political graffiti was not only illegal, it was often fatal. Infractions would be punished with long jail time and sometimes execution. Since the Americans, "taggers" have been using the walls to anonymously explore and sometimes test the limits of their freedom of speech. "If these walls could speak," indeed. Go read.
Posted by gris at July 15, 2004 04:22 PM