The Design Secret Behind Every Mall in America | Architectural Digest - YouTube
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The American shopping mall, the escalators, the fountains, the food court. At the mall, you can get your ears pierced, eat a giant pretzel, entertain your kids, and do your holiday shopping all in a single trip. It can be a little overwhelming. And that's actually by design. The mall is specifically designed to make you spend more time and more money than you mean to without even realizing it.
And what may be most surprising is that these design ideas actually come from classical European plazas. dating back thousands of years. I'm Michael Whitesner and I've been an architect for over 35 years. And today we're breaking down how shopping malls are designed to influence your behavior. So why is it called the mall? The term mall comes from a 17th century mallet and ball game called Paul Mall that was like a cross between croquet and golf.
And it was played on an alleyshaped court that was called a mall. In fact, the popular shopping and entertainment street in London, Paul Mall, was actually first built as a court for nobility to play this game, but was eventually converted to a street. Because of this game, many wide paths or streets lined by trees came to be referred to as malls, like the mall in New York Central Park, for example.
Fast forward to today, and modern shopping malls have replaced the trees with stores and replaced the game with shopping, but the basic shape remains. But nearly every other thing you find inside the mall is directly inspired by European plazas. So this is the Southdale Center Shopping Mall in Adina, Minnesota.
This mall in Adina was the first modern enclosed shopping mall in the United States. So looking at this image, first you could see it's one giant building under one giant roof. Secondly, there's two anchor stores. One is called Dayton's, one is called Donaldson's. And those two anchor stores are set up in what we call a dumbbell plan and they're connected with smaller shops and restaurants between them.
And typically that's the most common layout you see in malls today. And the reason for that is that people would pass from one anchor store to the other anchor store and they'd have to pass by all the smaller shops in between. But you'll also see a cartisian and a cluster design and we'll get into those a bit later.
The other thing you can see is that it's surrounded by all this parking. This was designed by Victor Gruin. And these cars are actually what inspired Victor Gruin to design the mall the way he did. Gruin was born in Vienna, Austria, and was accepted to the same art school that rejected Adolf Hitler. Later, Gruin immigrated to the United States to escape the Nazis.
And although he fled Europe, he fondly remembered the culture of pedestrian public life in Vienna and was outspoken in his dislike of the car focused suburbs of the United States. He saw cars as isolating and a threat to the idea of a social community. His vision was to create a gathering place where people would get out of their cars and spend time together as a community.
In essence, a sort of public plaza reinvented by the suburbs. And although before this there had been other versions of covered shopping arcades in the US like the arcade in Cleveland nicknamed the Crystal Palace of America, this mall in Adina was the first modern enclosed shopping mall in the United States.
American malls of course are not always fully enclosed and in fact Gruin and other notable architects like IMP and Renzo Piano have designed malls across America that are open air. But to become true commercial giants, shopping malls needed to be able to support lots of shoppers all year round, not just when the weather was good. And what makes these huge enclosed space possible is actually the advent of air conditioning.
And that's part of what made this mall in Minnesota so special. Once the mall became fully enclosed, that's when Gruin's design ideas evolved into an economic and psychological principle known as the Gruin transfer. So, let's take a look at the interior. So, this is what jumps out at me. First off, there's no windows.
All the natural light comes from above so that you can't see directly outside. Secondly, he brings you up to the second level via these escalators and he fills it with plants and a fountain. There are seating areas. And the other thing he does is he takes the storefronts and he turns them inboard.
And so instead of the stores facing out toward the street, now they're facing in towards the main space. It eliminated the barrier between the storefront and the outside. There's no door that you have to open anymore. The storefronts are completely open and people can flow in and out without any friction.
And so the shape of it is very much like a public plaza, which is very evident in the plan layout. So that dumbbell layout is quite evident here in that these two anchor stores, Dayton's and Donaldson's, are the two ends of the dumbbell and then connecting between them are the smaller shops and stores that are surrounding this plaza. So when you're in this central plaza, instead of looking out to windows, you're looking into stores.
So you could see that funny shape of the fountain which is right here. And you could see the escalators beyond which are right here and here that lead up to this bridge and the second floor. Even when you're on the second floor, you're still part of the main space. So if you were to remove the roof, this would look like almost any public plaza you would see in Europe.
It would end up looking a lot like this space. There's a fountain and there's a fountain here and there's this arcade along the sides and there's an arcade along here and along here there's an escalator that goes up. There's a stair that goes up here. The facades of these buildings are essentially the facades of the storefronts that are inside the plaza.
And they've even got the grid on the floor as you would see here and here. And similar to European plaza, there's a lot of areas for just sitting and talking. Gruin envisioned these shopping malls as places that were imitating what was happening in the European plazas of his youth. This great social community gathering place where people talk and people shop and people eat and people gather and it all happened as they were going around their daily lives.
So from this ancient idea came the idea that the mall is this singular enclosed building in which you could buy everything you needed. So if someone came in the morning, they could buy clothes and toys and gifts. They could stop for lunch and then buy their gardening tools and cleaning supplies and groceries on their way out. Then they would have been there the whole day around other people with the opportunity for spontaneous interaction with neighbors and shopkeepers.
In that way, the mall was designed to be a cultural hub and it was very successful. But the unintended consequence of this design, at least from Gruin's perspective, is the psychological phenomenon, which would later be described by retailers as the gruin transfer. So the gru and transfer is a psychological effect where a shopper plans to buy one thing but becomes disoriented and distracted by the many options in front of them causing them to buy other things they weren't planning to.
The transfer part is what happens when the shopper transfers their focus from need to desire. And the effect is amplified the more time that someone spends at the mall. So the key elements of the Gruin transfer are one, an overwhelming amount of choice, and two, a pleasant environment that makes you want to linger.
Retailers learned that when you combine these elements, shoppers spend more money than they intended to. In fact, Joan Ddian tells this great story that she went into a mall in Honolulu to buy a newspaper and came out with three hats, some flowers, and a toaster. It's the idea of an impulse buy. This idea has become so popular in the design of retail spaces that you see it adopted in individual stores like IKEA, which leads you on a winding path past every item in the store before you can leave.
It also happens at airports, which have incorporated malls in between check-in and the gate, forcing you past a dizzying array of shopping opportunities while you wait for your flight. Some people say that airports are now nothing but shopping malls where planes happen to take off and land. And you even see this idea in amusement parks.
In fact, Walt Disney was inspired to include elements of mall design in his plans for Epcot in Florida after touring Midtown Plaza Mall in Rochester, New York, also designed by Victor Gruin. And although this psychological effect is named for Victor Gruin, he always maintained that his design was focused on community and the human experience and the idea of getting people out of their cars.
And he rejected the notion that malls should cynically and intentionally manipulate people using this idea. He saw other malls that use design to maximize profits as a bastardization of his intentions, even saying, quote, "I refuse to pay alimony for those bastard developments." Of course, despite Gruin's outspoken opposition, malls are first and foremost built to make money.
And so, future malls would try to maximize the Gruin transfer in their designs. And one of the most successful examples of this is the Mall of America, also in Minnesota. So, this is the largest mall in America and it's 5.6 million square ft, which basically means you could fit 97 football fields or seven Yankee stadiums inside of it.
At the center of it is a 7 acre theme park. It has 520 stores, 60 restaurants, and an aquarium. It's so big that it has its own zip code. So, even though this building is colossal in size, you still see a lot of Gruin's original ideas. the bridge going across the top, the stores lining on the sides acting as an arcade, the idea that light comes from above with these skylights and this central gathering place in the middle and all these potted plants that bring greenery into the center.
And you could see here at the bottom the escalator that goes up to the upper level. A mall of this size would simply not work if it relied on stairs or elevators. In fact, without the rise of escalators, there is no mall. When the economy began to recover after World War II, retailers were looking for an edge to get the most out of every visitor to their store and the Otis Elevator Company began heavily marketing one of its main products, the escalator, as a tool to accomplish this.
The escalator fits seamlessly into the ideas of Gruin's designs. It allowed people to flow effortlessly between floors, unlike stairs, and without losing sight of stores like you would in an enclosed elevator. The other thing the elevator does is it pulls you out of the space. So you not only lose sight of the stores, but you're no longer part of the action.
You're no longer part of the environment. So the other thing the escalator allowed for was this sort of multiple paths through the space. You could see the whole space while you were riding the escalator and you could decide, hey, I want to go over there. This optionality, this multiple choice of paths amplifies the Gruin transfer once again.
So escalators really took off in a big way. And in fact, the number of escalators worldwide roughly doubles every 10 years. And with a single escalator, you're able to move 7 or 8,000 people up one floor in 1 hour. In a giant space like this one, you can see how valuable that kind of people moving technology would be. But to get an idea of how truly massive this shopping mall is, you have to look at it from the outside.
This image is just amazing to me. Let's break down what we're seeing. There are these four anchor stores at these corners. You could see these hotel and office complex at the two midsection ends. Then there are these two massive parking garages at the ends which hold over 12,000 cars. And then there are the smaller shops that surround this central skylighted atrium in the middle which is part of the 7acre theme park.
And if we take a look at that from the interior, those skylights here are these skylights here. There are 55 of these huge skylights in this central zone right here. So in this view, you can see the theme park is actually uh the Nickelodeon universe, but it used to be Camp Snoopy based on the Peanuts cartoon by Charles Schultz, who's also from Minnesota.
And so the other thing about this space in the middle is that it's absolutely massive and you can easily get lost in it amongst all these plantings and pavilions and amusement rides. But the rest of this mall is essentially laid out like a grid which is what you'd call a cartisian layout. The second of the three major types of mall plans that you most commonly see and the name cartisian comes from the great philosopher Renee Deart who was also a mathematician who created the system for plotting locations using an x and y axis as reference points. So
essentially this cartisian grid is basically just a dumbbell multiplied. So what happens is if you wanted to get from one anchor to the other anchor you've got to go through a dumbbell. But if you wanted to get diagonally from one anchor to the other anchor, you either have to navigate all the way around or you've got to get lost in the center of this maze like layout.
And so if all you wanted to do was get to these four anchor stores, you'd have to walk around the entire massive 5.6 million square ft mall. So this mall has been expanded many times, including a $325 million addition in 2015 where they added these hotel and office parks. But the Mall of America has ambitious plans to expand once again.
This time adding a $430 million water park with a lazy river and a retractable roof as well as additional hotels and another parking garage. But although the Mall of America is certainly the largest shopping mall in the United States, there's nowhere that maximizes the Gruin transfer quite like Las Vegas. This is an interior view of the forum shops at Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas.
And there's a lot of really interesting things going on in this image. So instead of introducing natural light from above, now they introduce the fake sky so that you think it's natural light, but in fact it's completely unnatural. And that allows them to control the time of day. So it's always the same time inside.
Very much how casinos like to work. You have no idea that time is passing. And so you're prone to spend even more time in a place. The other thing that this layout does that you see in this photo is it curves the pathways so you can't see the end. So it feels almost endless. The other thing that I find really amusing about this is this is supposed to emulate like a Roman village from ancient times and then I love that they take this medieval castle language and stick it on top of that.
I just think that's brilliant and that's a really Las Vegas thing to rebuild history like in a cartoon way. They have the pyramids, they have the Eiffel Tower, they have the New York skyline and the Trevy Fountain in Rome. I love this because what you have here is exactly what Gruin was inspired by but in this twisted perverted way.
So if Gruin was inspired by the original mall that had shops on either side and then it was covered and became an arcade with a skylight and then that became his mall which also was covered with natural light coming in. This has taken it all the way back to the beginning, but in this perverse and weird way in that now it's the sky is fake and it's completely covered but it's made to appear as if it's uncovered and at the same time it's pretending you're in the past instead of being modern and contemporary as Gruin intended it to be. The classical
architecture and fake sky in one sense echoes Gruin's original vision of a European public plaza, but it's been distorted to be entirely about commerce and even in a subtle way begins separating people instead of bringing them together. That's because instead of the dumbbell or cartisian grid shape from the first two examples, this mall introduces the idea of a cluster design.
In essence, a cluster design is intended to sort shoppers into groups by putting stores with similar target demographics into the same area of the mall, clustering those stores together. For example, one area might have all your sports equipment and athletic shoe stores together and another might be jewelry stores and so on.
So, when we look at this from above, you could see this is the strip right here. Caesar's Palace is over here. The fake sky is here and the fake sky is here. So, there's essentially three clusters. There's the cluster that has the fountain show, which is an eventbased cluster, and then has simple stores around it.
There's the cluster that has the high-end shops over here, which connects directly to the casino. And then there's this multi-story mall within a mall that happens to be right off the strip. So around the fountain show you find staple brands like Nike and the Cheesecake Factory, things that appeal to a broad swath of of the population.
And in the central area where the high-end shops are located, you find brands such as Van Clee and Arpels, Rolex, Jimmy Chu, Gucci, Versace, Balenciaga. So, I love the idea that after you've won at the casino, after you won big, you walk in directly to the high-end shops in the center. So, if you're in the casino where you don't know what time of day it is, and you exit to go into the shops, you still don't know what time of day it is because it's artificially controlled with that forever sunset in the fake sky. And then the mall within the mall
you find souvenir shops, toy stores, drugstores, the things you would expect to find when you walk in off the strip. So by looking at these three malls, you can see the journey of an idea from a space for community to a space that maximizes revenue. So what do you think? Did Gruin succeed or did he fail in creating a public plaza for the American suburbs?
