In fairness, I think the original concept behind the indoor mall was to replicate the old downtown main street shopping experience, except in a safe, climate controlled environment nearer to where everyone now lived in the suburbs. Where I grew up, many of the downtown stores moved into the new mall built on the then edge of town, which gave the mail a familiar feel. Over time, of course, those local stores closed, unable to survive the rent and competition of national chains. As a result, malls began to look and feel alike, as they all had pretty much the same lineup of national chains. Even worse, like would happen decades later with big box stores, way more malls were built than population growth could ever justify. Consider that at one time Tulsa had 6 malls plus Utica Square (Williams Forum, Southroads, Promenade, Eastland, Kensington Galleria, and Woodland Hills), and five Dillard’s stores. Setting aside the competition from big box and on-line retailers, it was inevitable that many malls would fail, particularly those not in high income and rapid growth areas.
Yes, architect Victor Gruen designed the original open-air and indoor malls and intended for them to be whole communities including housing, schools, etc so that life could go on year round in northern climates:
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 m2) 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."[6]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Gruen#CareerConveniently, American malls took the retail part of it which was the easiest and most profitable to repeat (at the time) and left out the integrated communities which would've just complicated the plans and caused issues with the standard mall model.
In a speech in London in 1978, Gruen disavowed shopping mall developments as having "bastardized" his ideas:[6][12] "I refuse to pay alimony for those bastard developments."[13] Gruen died on February 14, 1980.
However, Gruen's company designed malls for decades, taking the large contracts and never standing up for his ideals. So he is partly to blame for not realizing or even attempting his own dream.