Title and Inserts Design for the Documentary Der Gruen Effekt by Anette Baldauf und Katharina Weingartner www.pooldoks.com

Work: concept, tracking, animation, art direction

Software: After Effects, PFTrack

Gruen Effect – the intentional confoundment of wayfinding cues, in the hope that customers will get disoriented and spend more time and money in a mall

Victor Gruen (1903-1980) is considered to have been the inventor of the shopping mall. In the course of his life, he completed major urban interventions in the US and Western Europe that fundamentally altered the course of western urban development. The film describes how Gruen’s fame rests mostly on the insertion of commercial machines into the decentred US suburbs. These so-called ‘shopping towns’ were supposed to strengthen civic life and structure the amorphous, mono-functional agglomerations of suburban sprawl. Yet within a decade, Gruen’s designs had become the architectural extension of the policies of racial and gender segregation underlying the US postwar consumer utopia.