Fifty years ago, the mall was born. America would never be the same.

The father of modern shopping malls, Victor Gruen , once said "

It's the merchants who will save our urban civilization."

Frank Lloyd Wright once commented Gruen's mall as "a garden court that has all the evils of the
village street and none of its charm".

Have the shopping malls saved our urban civiization? I doubt.

The growth of malls most likely does not appear to follow demographic logic. The cheapest land
on the fringe of the cities now functions more like a chaotic spawled "train station" where
people go in and out.

The elegancy of the design of malls is also disfigured by "the ugliness and discomfort of the
land-wasting seas of parking" around them. Maybe Frank Lloyd Wright was right with his question:


"What is this, a railroad station or a bus station?"