Victor Gruen was born on July 18, 1903, in a middle-class Jewish family in Vienna, Austria. He studied architecture at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts. A committed socialist, from 1926 until 1934 he ran the “political cabaret at the Naschmarkt”-theatre. At that time he came to know Felix Slavik, the future mayor of Vienna, and they became friends.

As an architect he worked for Peter Behrens, and in 1933 opened his own architectural firm in Vienna. His firm specialized in remodeling of shops and apartments.

When Germany annexed Austria in 1938, he emigrated to the United States. Short and stout, he landed “with an architect’s degree, eight dollars, and no English.” Arriving in New York he changed his name to Gruen from Grünbaum and started to work as a draftsman. After the success of his design for the Lederer leather-goods boutique on Fifth Avenue, he received further commissions for the design of shops, including Ciro’s on Fifth Avenue, Steckler’s on Broadway, Paris Decorators on the Bronx Concourse, and eleven branches of the clothing chain Grayson’s.

In 1941 he moved to Los Angeles and remarried. A decade later, in 1951, he founded the architectural firm “Victor Gruen Associates”, which was soon to become one of the major planning offices of that time. After the war, he designed the first suburban open-air shopping facility called Northland Mall near Detroit in 1954. After the success of the first project, he designed his best-known work for the owners of Dayton Department stores, the 800,000-square-foot (74,000 m) Southdale Mall in Edina, Minnesota, the first enclosed shopping mall in the country. Opening in 1956, Southdale was meant as the kernel of a full-fledged community. The mall was commercially successful, but the original design was never fully realized, as the intended apartment buildings, schools, medical facilities, park and lake were not built. Because he invented the modern mall, Malcolm Gladwell, writing in The New Yorker, suggested that “Victor Gruen may well have been the most influential architect of the twentieth century.”

Until the mid-1970s, his office designed over fifty shopping malls in the United States. Gruen was the principal architect for a luxury housing development built on the 48-acre (190,000 m) site of Boston, Massachusetts’ former West End neighborhood. The first of several Gruen towers and plazas was completed in 1962. This development, known as Charles River Park is regarded by many as a dramatically ruthless re-imagining of a former immigrant tenement neighborhood (Gans, O’Conner, The Hub). In 1956, Gruen drafted a comprehensive revitalization plan for the central business district of downtown Fort Worth, Texas, but most components of the plan were never realized. Dr. ETH Ing. Walid Jabri, the architect and structural engineer, designed the 55,000 square-meter business complex Centre Gefinor, which was built in the late 1960s on Rue Clémenceau in Beirut, Lebanon for which Victor Gruen designed the complete commercial area on the ground floor and the mezzanine after the completion of the skeleton. Gruen also designed the Greengate Mall in Greensburg, Pennsylvania, which opened in 1965, as well as the Lakehurst Mall in 1971 for Waukegan, Illinois.

In 1963, on his 21st birthday, son New York attorney Michael S. Gruen (then a Harvard undergraduate) was given a painting “Schloss Kammer am Attersee II” by Gustav Klimt. While ownership of the painting was given to his son in 1963, the elder Gruen continued to hang it in his living room and even paid for insurance and repairs. Upon Gruen’s death in 1980, his widow, Kemija, refused to surrender the painting to Michael, resulting in a landmark case in the New York Supreme Court and Court of Appeals. The Court of Appeals ruled the basis of inter vivos gifts, including the plaintiff having the burden of proof to a clear and convincing standard that the chattel was a gift and the required elements of a gift. Kemija Gruen claimed that if the painting was to be given after death, even if such arrangement was made years earlier, then the will, not a letter, would be instructive as to disposition. Michael Gruen was eventually awarded $2.5 million.

In 1968, he returned to Vienna, where he engaged in the gradual transformation of the inner city into a pedestrian zone, of which only some parts have been implemented, including Kärntner Straße and Graben.

In a speech in London in 1978, Gruen disavowed shopping mall developments as having “bastardized” his ideas: “I refuse to pay alimony for those bastard developments.” Gruen died on February 14, 1980.