Robinson STORE A dramatic billboard treatment topped the entrance to this department store at 1020 Market street, [Philadelphia, Pennsylvania] late 1940s?-- early 1950s Address: 1020 Market Street Architect: Victor Gruen and Elsie Krummeck Built: 1946 The former Robinson Department Store is maybe the least “Philadelphian” of any building in the city. It looms over Market Street like a Pacific swell breaking over a square city’s streetscape. But the surging tide of modernism the building once promised never really reached us, and today Robinson’s stands frozen and forgotten, like a plastic kiddie pool propped up against an abandoned house. The store was designed by Victor Gruen, who is today mostly demonized for spawning the shopping mall as we know it. But in 1946 Gruen was a new American, having fled Vienna before the war to work in the drafting rooms of the 1939 New York World’s Fair. In the 1940s, he and partner Elsie Krummeck were at the vanguard of commercial architecture, building sleek and radical storefronts in downtowns nationwide. The Market Street store was one of eleven the couple designed for the California-based Grayson-Robinson chain of budget womensware, and each of these Austro-Angelean behemoths was a unique flourish of curves, color, and commerce. They were machines for blinging, and they heralded a bright new era of architecture as advertisement. The Philadelphia store is one of the last to remain standing, but it casts a Dorian Gray-ish pall over Market Street today. The tile mosaic facade is waterstained and pockmarked with bolt-holes from the now-lost Robinson sign. One parapet has been lopped off. Once an elegant arcade with floating glass display cases, the ground floor is now stuffed with standard-issue storefronts, complete with metal security grates and plastic back-lit sign boxes. It’s weird, dirty, and dated– like a Frank Furness building probably looked in 1946. Gruen’s chickens have come home to roost in the Gallery at Market East across the street– a bustling but architecturally invisible affirmation of Gruen’s later shopping mall ethos. But is it too late to give up on his earlier urban visions?
Posted on: Wed, 15 Oct 2014 21:34:39 +0000
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