“I had lost a chunk of my life, my good name and around 27 pounds,” he recalled in a 2007 memoir, “Threshold Resistance: The Extraordinary Career of a Luxury Retailing Pioneer.” But he added: “I’m out and I’m not bitter. I believe in the system. It’s still the greatest system in the world.”

Adolph Alfred Taubman was born in Pontiac, Mich., on Jan. 31, 1924, one of four children of Jewish immigrants from Germany, Philip and Fannie Ester Blustin Taubman. His father was a builder, but the family was hit hard in the Depression and Adolph, who stuttered, was dyslexic and had difficulty reading and writing, took part-time jobs.

He sold shoes and did construction work while studying architecture in the 1940s at the University of Michigan and the Lawrence Institute of Technology, but graduated from neither. He went into business in 1950, borrowing $5,000 to build and rent out a store. More stores, then parking lots, followed. By 1953, he owned a string of strip shopping centers.

As the postwar middle class migrated to the suburbs, he developed the Mall at Short Hills in New Jersey, the Queens Center in New York, Woodfield Center outside Chicago and Fairlane Town Center near Detroit, eventually expanding to 20 malls from coast to coast. He designed them with skylights, waterfalls, leafy interiors and wide store entranceways to overcome what he called “threshold resistance.”

He persuaded major retailers to move in — Neiman Marcus, Nordstrom, Saks Fifth Avenue, Marshall Field’s — as well as designer shops like Yves Saint Laurent, Ralph Lauren and Louis Vuitton. He promoted malls as places to take the family, meet friends, hang out, catch a movie or a meal — and shop.

“Suburban growth after the war,” he told The New York Times in 1977, “allowed us to build large developments based on new road patterns and new freeways that came in. We were able to duplicate to a great degree what occurs in a downtown, all under one ownership and one control.”

Critics said that he siphoned business and jobs from downtowns, hastening the decline of old cities like Detroit, and that by turning farmland and wilderness areas into parking lots he intensified traffic and pollution. He rejected the criticisms, calling malls the modern equivalent of ancient marketplaces. And he earned millions, spending lavishly for Kandinskys, Pollocks, French Impressionists — and more properties.