 Southdale Center was developed by the Dayton Company and designed by Victor Gruen, an Austrian immigrant and socialist. Gruen was a European-style socialist; he found individual stores in downtown venues to be inefficient, and the suburban lifestyle of 1950s America too "car-centric" and wanted to design a building that would be a communal gathering place, where people would shop, drink coffee, and socialize, as he remembered from his native Vienna. Southdale Center was loosely modeled on the arcades of several heavily populated European cities and purposely included "eye-level display cases" to "lure customers into stores". Gruen imaged that Southdale would eventually include "a medical center, schools and residences, not just a parade of glitzy stores." The first plans unveiled for the shopping center were announced in 1952 by Gruen and Minnesota native, Donald Dayton.
