'The Gruen Transfer'

Those with an unusual surname have to get used to spelling it. No it’s not Gluner. Not Glueball or Grewbie it’s Gruen “G-R-U-E-N”. The compensation is your name identifies you or a family member pretty clearly.

But odd things happen to Gruens. In the 1990s I believe some activists were unable to register “The Australian Green Party” because it was similar to the Greens. So for over a decade, Gruens marking their ballot papers wondered just who the Australian Gruen Party were, and why they hadn’t been in touch.

And now I’m getting daily e-mails asking if my finance company is really becoming the Gruen Bank, the first commercial outfit to advertise on the ABC. And what was Andrew Denton doing holding up Gruen Beer at the Logies?

You can find out tonight when The Gruen Transfer premiers on ABC TV.

Victor Gruen’s life was suffused with excitement, irony and ultimately disappointment. Like my father Fred, Victor was a Viennese Jew who escaped the continent in the 1930s. Victor was also a socialist, an architect and an active participant in Viennese cabaret.

Even with the Gestapo closing in he had an eye for the main chance. A friend donned a Nazi stormtrooper’s uniform and drove Gruen to the airport. That was the first Gruen Transfer.

Gruen found quick success as an architect in America. A modernist fan of Le Corbusier, he designed enticing storefronts with mini-arcades at the entrances to inveigle customers into the shop’s space whereupon eye level displays would draw them further into the store. They were dubbed “mousetraps” for customers.

He had found his métier.

He was a strange mix of bombast, restlessness, idealism and megalomania.

His architecture sought to recreate in the suburbs the civic space of the Viennese Ringstrasse.

So naturally enough ... he invented the shopping mall.

One of his earlier designs from the 40s envisaged a mall with 28 shops and 13 civic facilities including a library, post office, theatre, lecture hall, night club, nursery, playroom and a stable.

Gruen proposed a 20-year building program to leading department store firm J.L. Hudson Company starting in Detroit. He proposed the construction of four malls on the (then) fringes of the city - Eastland, Northland, Southland, and Westland. Sound familiar?

His next mall in Minnesota in 1956 was hermetically sealed from the elements - air conditioned “eternal spring”. Among the shops were fountains, sculptures, arcades and courtyards bathed in natural light where people could meet for a coffee. There was even an aviary.

The New Yorker described him as a “a sort of intracontinental guided missile” with “heavy brows, unruly dark hair, and a no less unruly Viennese accent” shuttling between five national offices boasting that “the merchants in his malls would save our urban civilization”;

Sometimes self-interest has remarkable spiritual consequences. As art patrons, merchants can be to our time what the Church and the nobility were to the Middle Ages.

He proposed banning manufacturing and warehouses from New York and putting all cars and trucks underground. The sooner we helped taxi-drivers - “leading promoters of urban hysteria - to be less hysterical the better”.

Gruen even appealed to the cold war zeitgeist. With the population farcically rehearsing “duck and cover” drills, malls were located away from industrial targets and able to serve as first aid shelters if necessary.

But Gruen’s modernist industrial dreaming somehow went awry. Civic spaces didn’t pay rent like shops and so were rationalised.

The “Gruen Transfer” became psychologists’ jargon for that moment when the disoriented customer yields, eyes glazed, to the muzak, the timeless smooth, anodyne décor and the endless arcades.

Gruen disavowed this kind of manipulation. But he wasn’t beyond explaining to clients how relieving “little Mrs Shopper” of her suburban boredom, one might also relieve her of her cash.

By the late 1960s malls were contributing to urban decline. They sucked out some of the civic and commercial life from the inner suburbs and isolated the more affluent whites in outer suburbs from the inner suburbs’ growing poverty, racial problems and social dysfunction.

As Detroit and other mall ringed cities went up in flames Victor made another Gruen Transfer, this time back to Vienna where he defended his legacy and lamented what he now called the “Sad Story of Shopping Centers”.

And the suburban fringe of Vienna housed a new development. A shopping mall.