It’s common for people to view the types of malls I started building in the 1960s — gigantic, air-conditioned, enclosed environments — as twentieth-century American inventions. But malls are neither contemporary nor American. And while it may have seemed that I was embarking on a risky gamble, I was in fact walking in the footsteps of generations of retail pioneers.
Now, that might sound strange coming from me. Along with Victor Gruen, the Viennese architect who designed much-studied retail projects in Detroit and Minneapolis in the 1950s, I am often listed among the early creators of this “new” retail archetype. As Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point
–by Alfred Taubman
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