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  3. Shopping malls are symbols of suburban life in the United States. The idea for this most American of architectural landmarks, ho

Shopping malls are symbols of suburban life in the United States. The idea for this most American of architectural landmarks, ho

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问题     Shopping malls are symbols of suburban life in the United States. The idea for this most American of architectural landmarks, however, came from a European immigrant, Victor Gruen.

    Victor Gruen grew up in Vienna, Austria, studying architecture at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts, the same school that had previously turned down a fledging artist named Adolf Hitler. At night, Gruen performed theatre in smoke-filled cafes around the city. When Hitler’s Nazis invaded Austria in 1938, Gruen decided to emigrate. One of his theatre friends—posing as an officer in a Nazi uniform—drove Gruen and his wife to the airport. They took the first plane they could catch to Zurich, Switzerland, made their way to England, and then obtained passage on a ship bound for New York. They landed in the United States, as Gruen later remembered, " with an architect’s degree, eight dollars, and no English. "
    One day, Gruen went for a walk in midtown Manhattan and ran into an old friend from Vienna who wanted to open a leather-goods boutique on Fifth Avenue. Gruen agreed to design it, and the result was a revolutionary storefront, with a kind of mini-arcade in the entranceway: six exquisite glass cases, spotlights, and faux marble, with green corrugated glass on the ceiling. It was a " customer trap". This was a brand-new idea in American retail design, particularly on Fifth Avenue, where all the storefronts were facing the street. The critics raved.
    Gruen designed Ciro’s on Fifth Avenue, Steckler’s on Broadway, Paris Decorators on the Bronx Concourse, and eleven branches of the California clothing chain Grayson’s. In the early 1950s, he designed an outdoor shopping centre called Northland, outside Detroit, Michigan. It covered one hundred and sixty-three acres and had nearly ten thousand parking spaces. This was little more than a decade and a half since he had stepped off the boat. When Gruen watched the bulldozers break ground, he turned to his partner and said. "We’ve got a lot of nerve. "
    Gruen’s most famous creation was his next project, in the town of Edina, just outside Minneapolis , Minnesota. It was called Southdale Mall. Until then, most shopping centres had been what architects like to call " extroverted," meaning that store windows and entrances faced both the parking area and the interior pedestrian walkways. Southdale was "introverted"—the exterior walls were blank, and all the activity was focused on the inside. Suburban shopping centres had always been in the open, with stores connected by outdoor passageways. Gruen had the radical ideas of putting the whole complex under one roof, with air-conditioning in the summer and heating in the winter.
    Work on Southdale began in 1954. It cost twenty million dollars and took two years to construct. It had seventy-two stores and two anchor department stores, Donaldson’s on one end and Dayton’s on the other.
    Almost every other major shopping centre was on a single level, which made for long walks. Gruen’s approach was to put stores on two levels, connected by escalators and fed by two tiered parking. In the middle, he put a kind of town square: a "garden court" under skylight, with a fishpond, enormous sculpted trees, a twenty-one-foot cage filled with brightly colored birds, balconies with hanging plants, and a cafe.
    The result was a sensation. Journalists from all of the country’s top publications came for Southdale’s opening. "The Splashiest Centre in the U. S. ," wrote one magazine. "A pleasure dome with parking," cheered another. One journalist announced that overnight Southdale had become an integral " part of the American Way. " It simulated a magnetic urban downtown area in the middle of suburbia: the variety, the individuality, the lights, the color, and the crowds. This downtown essence was enhanced by all kinds of things that ought to be there if downtown areas weren’t so noisy and dirty and chaotic, such as sidewalk cafes, art, islands of planting, and pretty paving. Other shopping centres, however pleasant, seemed provincial in contrast with the real thing, the city’s downtown. In Minneapolis, however, it was the downtown that appeared small and provincial in contrast to Southdale’s metropolitan characters.
    One person who wasn’t dazzled by Gruen’s concept was the famous architect Frank Lloyd Wright. "What is this, a railroad station or a bus station?" he asked, when he came for a tour of Southdale. "You’ve got a garden court that has all the evils of the village street and none of its charm. " No one listened to Frank Lloyd Wright. When it came to malls, it was only Victor Gruen’s vision that mattered.
Questions 56 to 60
Mark each statement as either true(T)or false(F)according to the passage.
Southdale was the first regional shopping centre in the United States.
选项 A、TRUE
B、FALSE
答案B
解析 原文第五段中首次提到Southdale。由该段的内容可知，Southdale并不是美国第一个地区购物中心。本题表述与文章意思不符，因此错误。
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本试题收录于： A类竞赛（研究生）题库大学生英语竞赛（NECCS）分类
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大学生英语竞赛（NECCS）

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