Exploded View - Matt Olson: Radical Art/chitecture - Gianni Pettena

Ice House I (1972 Mpls) Gianni Pettena - phot FRAC Centre

"Are you making something or destroying something?"

That was the question posed by a kid who stopped to watch Italian artist/architect Gianni Pettena work on Clay House: Situation #4, a work described in an Artforum article from 1972 as a "common frame house in Minneapolis (that) was completely covered in clay." I'm not sure if the kid knew it, but it was a perfect and somewhat profound question; and one that would have applied to other works that Pettena did while he was here in Minneapolis in 1971-72 as a visiting professor of design at MCAD, which was then part of the MIA.

Gianni Pettena was a key figure in the radical architecture and anti-design movement that happened during the sixties and early seventies. Along with Italians like Superstudio, Archizoom and Ugo La Pietra, as well as collectives like Archigram in England and Haus Rucker Co in Germany, Pettena created works that challenged what architecture's role was. Their work crossed boundaries into other areas of avant-garde culture, music and art. Ultimately, the movement would end up influencing many of today's most heralded architects like Zaha Hadid and Rem Koolhaas.

Ice House II (1972 Mpls) - Gianni Pettena photo FRAC Centre

A lot of the work created by these radical art/chitecture groups was theoretical and informed by a post-pop art, political and social take on emerging technology and often contained a sense of the youthful violence that was also present in Futurism, another avant-garde movement that was largely Italian. Pettena's work seems a little different though, more abstract, playful and poetic. He was most interested in the boundaries between art and architecture and stated once that "artists build and architects draw", believing that it's usually artists that propose visual languages directed at the transformation of space rather than architects. Pettena was trained as an architect but his actual building has been very limited, preferring in his early years to use the language of conceptual and environmental art, and in later years to work as a teacher and prolific critic.

The work Pettena did while he was in Minneapolis is some of his best. Ice House I was a former school that was turned into a giant block of ice, in Ice House II, a house gets the same treatment.

His installations at the MIA were brilliant. His Wearable Chair was a fantastic, playful piece that involved Pettena and his students taking a directed walk to and from downtown Minneapolis all wearing their chairs. While the piece was mocked in a Star Tribune review at the time, it looks more like an early example of 'experientialist art' rather than furniture design now.

Wearable Chair (1972) - Gianni Pettena

Gianni Pettena is one of my favorite figures in art and architecture because his work while being dense and deeply interesting, both philosophically and intellectually, is also filled with poetry and immediate intuitive possibility.

It's that sense of poetry and possibility that makes me wonder if the kid who asked him "Are you making something or destroying something?" really "got" the work on a deep level.

I highly encourage you to look in to Gianni Pettena's whole career, but especially the work he created here in 1971-72. Also check out some posts at the ROLU studio blog written by last year's winter intern, Nicolas Allinder, here, here and here.

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Mod Minn(ies): Guide to Spending a Local Holiday

Cyber Monday kicked off last week with online shoppers eager to save some cash and avoid lines this holiday season. But if your goal is to help the local design economy, reconsider your propensity to point and click away that valuable holiday budget. Instead spend your dollars with local designers and retailers and help celebrate the great Minnesota Arts Culture. When you shop here the dollar stays here: studies show that for every dollar spent locally 42% more of the wealth stays local. Here are some ideas for finding those local modern treasures this holiday season:

Shoppe Local: 813 W 50^th Street
Mon-Sat: 9:30AM-9:00PM, Sun:11:00AM-6:00PM
Launched by the owners of Patina, Shoppe Local sells only Minnesota products created by local designers and artisans. It features fun, inventive and eclectic gifts all created within a two hundred mile radius. Products range from well-known companies like Minnetonka Moccasins to more unique fare, such as Block Bots Toys made by young architect and designer Will Dohman. Dohman’s artful toys are a perfect example of how local designers are creating alternatives to products shipped halfway around the world. Block Bots are made from reclaimed wood and offer customizable options for those inspired to make their own block avatars.

Walker Shop: 1750 Hennepin Ave.
Mon: Closed, Tues-Sun: 11AM-6PM
Nestled beneath the big crinkled aluminum block hovering over Hennepin Avenue, the Walker Art Center’s retail venue offers classic museum apparel, publications, and posters, but also has one of the best collections of design publications in the City. It includes most of the books on the region’s best designers. If you’re after a copy of Vince James and Associates’ monograph or Thomas Fisher’s book on Salmela Architects, you can find it perched on the Shop’s glossy white shelves with other regional publications. While not all products are local, all proceeds support the Walker's artistic and educational programs.

Global Market: Lake Street & 10^th Avenue
When we sit down to our holiday meals we don’t often realize the vast distances traversed to get our traditional treats to the Minnesota dinner table. According to recent studies, the average meal roams some 1200 miles before it reaches the consumer. One answer to more sustainable holiday sustenance is shopping at the markets found in the Mid-Town Global Market. Some 50 local businesses sell their wares from brightly colored stands of distinct ethnic pageantry. You’ll find food shops like Grass Roots Gourmet, which sells only “small batch products” from Minnesotan farms within 100 miles of downtown Minneapolis, and The Produce Exchange selling local and global products. Organic produce, local meats and artisan gifts are just a few of the wonderful goods provided in the historic Sears & Roebuck Warehouse along Lake Street.


High Point Center for Print Making: 912 W. Lake Street
One of Lake Street<’s coolest new storefronts, High Point’s refreshingly modern renovation by James Dayton Design has created a stunning new home for this non-profit focused on celebrating printmaking. The new facility offers community access to studio space, instructional classes, and gallery spaces open to the public. High Point, however, isn’t just for those who aspire to make beautiful prints. Their gallery provides talented Minnesota artists with the ability to showcase and sell their works, making a unique local shopping experience for the modern art lover in your life. The current exhibit Prints On Ice, is on display until December 23^rd.

Roam: 813 Glenwood Avenue
Mon-Fri: 10AM-6PM, Sat: 10AM-5PM
Roam is one of those stores that makes a modernist’s heart skip. It’s the latest addition to the growing design area around International Market Square, and is a perfect place to uncover gifts for any design-savvy friends. Roam stocks the latest in European inspired modern home furnishings, but also has an extensive collection of locally designed trinkets from Silvercocoon and BluDot furniture. The store, in fact, is one of the few DotSpots in the nation to sell BluDot’s entire line.

If you’re interested in helping to boost the local design community this holiday season, support your local shops and artisans. For more information on supporting the local economy check out MN Made for further resources on keeping your modern holiday local. Read More......

Suburban Archaeology #7: The Design of Christmas

While I believe that goodwill to men, peace and selfless giving are good things, I'd be a liar if I didn't come clean and say that the thing that gets me revved up most about the Mother of all Holidays is the design aspect of the whole thing. Christmas is absolutely bathed in a richly diverse and rewarding amount of eyecandy and giddy sentimentality. As an artist and designer who himself works year 'round with blazing color, whimsical shapes and whose inspirations come from primarily nostalgic sources, Christmas never fails to disappoint me in how its dense, omnipresent visual symphony so dynamically and completely transforms the entire built (and unbuilt) environment.

Take a drive down any street...and I mean any street...whether it's lined with houses, shops, office parks or strip malls, no single place escapes the wrath of Christmas decoration. The beautiful thing is that no one WANTS to escape it. It's a shared passion and it makes us feel good. Our popular culture celebrates it. Movies, songs, television commercials and marketing & advertising all gleefully feed into and further the collective energy of Christmas Design. I believe it's this love for the collective design and everyone's willingness to support and maintain it is what's kept the holiday so strong and unwavering in popularity for so long. Like a stroll through Disneyland, the casual stroll through this "Winter Wonderland" is a breathtaking internal process that takes most adults back to feeling like a kid again and makes kids very happy to be kids. So what is it exactly about this seasonal aesthetic that makes us feel so euphoric? Certainly at the most primal level it's bright lights, shiny surfaces and outrageous color schemes. But at a higher, more cerebral level, it's the invisible thread of commonality running through it that pulls it all (and all of us) together like a neatly wrapped gift.

The connectivity to youth. Warm and fuzzy childhood feelings. The gifts, the lights, the trips to the mall, the sights, the smells. It's a shared social Pavlovian response that tends to last from late October well through December. The sleeping, dormant child awakes in all of us and is elated at the prospects. Lights going up against the backdrop of snowflakes and Bing Crosby on the radio. The comfort of familiarity, the comfort of another year of traditions welcomed back again. We remember Christmases past. Mom crafting colorful jello molds and Dad putting up the tree. We remember holding big, parental hands while strolling the mall absolutely bursting at the seams with tinsel, ornamentation and the latest to-die-for toys.

The connectivity to our fellow man. Neighbors, friends, the stranger down the block. Seemingly what begins at the living room tree carries out and into the street, meandering its way through neighbors' homes as well as the shopkeeper on the edge of town and beyond, ad infinitum. Be it thoughtful artistic installations, creative interior design or washes of inescapable capitalistic commerce innocently disguised as whimsy, this annual aesthetic collective helps to bind us as a society to both our shared past and each other.

The design of Christmas is a gift that year after year, generation after generation, joyfully keeps on giving.

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Model Reality | Tom Westbrook

I teach a design history class, so I spend a lot of time in Google image search, looking for historic images of buildings and interiors to illustrate the lecture. Amongst the images that have been coming up recently were what looked like perfectly detailed models of some of these places. In fact, they were examples of a recently budding trend known as tilt shift photography. This process uses a special lens or digital manipulation to make an image of a real place look like a model. A small and narrow depth of field and a significant amount of blurring give the image the qualities of a close up photograph of a scale model. Seeing the world as a model is somehow fascinating.


As designers we model space in many ways, through orthographic projections, perspectival views, and, as programs become more powerful and sophisticated, fully realized digital models of the designed environment. One can develop a virtual 3D model in Sketch Up or Revit rapidly, manipulate it in space, fly through the interior and move the entire assembly through space and time to study the effects of the sun. However, the reality being represented is cinematic in nature, our experience of it is directed and we still see it only as images, moving or not, on a flat screen. No matter how well developed and powerfully rendered, there is still a sense of disconnectedness for the viewer. While we can create a model that mimics the way the designed space will look, it in no way is like being in a real place or space.


A physical model allows a different sort of occupation, one that requires some effort. However, that effort increases our level of engagement with the space, allowing a greater sense of occupation. Rather than being shown how the space may look, we must imagine ourselves at scale, moving through the space. While this is certainly true for designers, (“Models are like flypaper for architects”) I believe it is true for almost everyone.

In a crowded studio in North East Minneapolis, Robert Feyereisen, Suzi Strothman (source of the flypaper quote above) and their crew turn our digital realities into the physical. Stacks of material cover nearly every available surface; chipboard, veneers, sheets of basswood, ply and acrylic, sometimes neatly sorted by size and thickness, elsewhere piled in seeming disarray. Interspersed are tools ranging from the heavily used laser cutter and large table saw to delicate knifes and dental tools. Bins of parts, fittings and fasteners along with models in various states of completion surround the workspaces.

Here they make models ranging from the highly finished, illuminated models used as sales tools to study models in multiple iterations. Designers can order a kit of parts and use the models as a design tool. Feyereisen Studios recently completed a model of the Stillwater Lift Bridge designed as a study aid for the visually impaired.

As some of you may know (and as may become apparent through these missives) I am a bit of a Luddite. It may have something to do with my seeming ability to make nearly any computer program freeze and crash, but I think is also based on my love of manipulation of the material world. As a designer, I feel a sense of unease -- if not loss -- with the continued movement into a digital and virtual world. I feel strongly that we need to keep building and studying physical models as we design, as a way to test what we have drawn, but also as a way to keep a physical connection to the process of design, moving our hands and minds. Read More......

High-end Natural

This one will make you drool. This summer, I got to cover a national award-winning residential landscape in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Officially called the Two Rivers Residence by its designer, Verdone Landscape Architecture, it’s the family home of the Coxheads. They moved to this amazing spot from a cottonwood forest farther down the valley. The views are a little better here – their bedroom looks straight at the Grand Teton.

What I was impressed with (and what I cover in more detail in Landscape Architecture Magazine; get a sample here; see more images from ASLA’s awards site here) was how new the project is and how old it looks.

The main pond, nestled into the L-shape of the house, a patio visible behind a stone wall behind the pond.

Teton County has extraordinarily strict environmental regulations, so when the Coxheads went to develop their 35 acres (a county minimum lot size), they could only build on about two acres. The site was blessed with river frontage (that was invisible well beyond the building envelope) and existing conifer forests (again beyond the building envelope). Landscape architect Jim Verdone and Bozeman, Montana-based architects JLF sited the building, and then Verdone pulled the landscape up to the facades like a blanket.

A dining pavilion seems to float on a constructed pond.

On one side, native grass sod touches the face of a restored creamery that was moved from eastern Montana and forms the main wing of the house. The house has two wings arranged in a L-shape. The creamery has the kitchen, living/dining room, and upstairs rec rooms; the other wing (all new) has multiple bedrooms and bathrooms. Verdone tapped groundwater to create a spring-fed pool nestled in the L-shape of the house. Restored wetlands create an entry experience and flow under the guest house porch. Large conifers were transplanted to bring the forest up to and around the sides of the master bedroom.

The landscape is pulled up to the house on all sides, erasing any sense of the degraded pasture that was once there.

Everything is exceedingly natural, deliberately inspired by the design of National Parks (Teton is just down the road). The house seems set carefully within an existing (and stunning) landscape, which of course it wasn’t – it was set on a degraded pasture with nice views. This aesthetic is a major departure, Verdone told me, from a lot of what gets done in Teton, but he’s seeing more of this more modest style with the economic downturn. Two Rivers also stands in stark contrast to this year’s other award winners, which are far more modern (including the Speckman House in Saint Paul, which was covered earlier in L.Architecture). Amazingly, this landscape still cost more than $250,000. Does that suggest that good design ain’t cheap – no matter the style? Read More......

In Plain Sight | American For Life

What does this image have to do with incarceration?

This past summer, Architecture Minnesota featured my photo and commentary regarding a large-scale patriotic display in the small town of Appleton, MN. While I only spoke to the image's visible content in that “Place” feature, I have always associated a much broader and contradictory set of emotions with the photograph because of the less-photogenic memories I've made in this town.

Sure, as a child I came here with my family for all-American events like the annual Applefest celebration. But then, as part of my high school psychology class, I toured the town's largest employer--a privately-owned, for-profit prison. Eerily reminiscent of Scared Straight (and with what seemed like frighteningly little supervision), life-sentence inmates showed us around their home and told us how the rest of their days would be spent behind bars because they accidentally shot and killed their girlfriend in a botched drug deal.

Originally built to pull this agricultural community out of the farming recession of the 1980s, the 1600-bed Prairie Correctional Facility is one of several dozen privately-owned prison facilities run by companies like Corrections Corporation of America. Thanks to a combination of tighter drug laws around the country and states like Colorado, Washington, and Hawaii being short on space at their own government-run facilities, PCF operated at capacity for decades—providing hundreds of stable jobs in the process. However, now that many states have boosted their prison capacity (and due to rising costs associated with transporting criminals to the very, very midwest) PCF is struggling to fill its beds. While the company desperately pursues states like Pennsylvania and Minnesota with which to contract more inmates, there have already been devastating staff lay-offs, and the region now risks losing its most important source of tax revenue.

Am I the only one conflicted about this? Is this all ethically compatible somehow? Is this simply a case of a community doing what it needs to do in order to survive? Is it too late to choose a different path? Can a town name each one of its 34 streets after their fallen war heroes while at the same time betting its economic livelihood on the spoils of a private corporation which incarcerates public offenders from (mostly) out of state?

In my many trips through town since that high school field trip, I've noticed that Main Street is dark and the flags (above) are only lit up on holidays. So it's an unsettling case of something more disturbing 'hiding in plain sight' to always see a bright orange glow hovering over Appleton's night sky.

What does this image have to do with patriotism?

(And to confirm what you may have already suspected, yes, the inmates do have TVs, ping pong, Nintendo, and a host of other amenities. However, and trust me on this, regardless of what you hear about prisons being soft on crime, you still never, never, never want to go there.) Read More......

A Start?

In July 2006, a week before I moved to New York, I was fortunate enough to attend one of the seminal moments in the architectural history of Minneapolis, the opening of the new Guthrie Theater. Each one of the theater's three stages hosted a concert that night, every one representing a different genre of music. Afterwards, as the three diverse crowds merged, it really felt as if the entire city was there inhabiting the lobbies and walking the ramp of the cantilevered bridge. Everyone was enjoying the building and was enjoying being in the building, together. The collective joy felt by everyone on opening night has cemented that evening in my brain as one of my favorite moments and cemented the Jean Nouvel design as one of my favorite buildings.

A few weeks ago I visited the soon to be completed 100 Eleventh Avenue residences here in New York to get my Nouvel fix. The building is stunning. It is both beautiful and bewildering. The faceted glass planes catch sunlight and their varying shades of greens and blues change the color of the light just before bouncing it back to you. It’s like looking at a 20 storey Internally Flawless diamond. The façade is composed of over sixteen hundred different types of windows, and I found my self trying to find two of the same type or a repeted module. It was a futile and inappropriate exercise. The facade is a texture, not a pattern. As such it plants a new seed into a previously void area in the urban fabric and does so in conjunction with Frank Gehry’s IAC building across 11th Avenue. Now, add in the Shigeru Ban project directly to the east of the Gehry building and you realize that in these three projects a kernel of thoughtful architecture has started on New York’s west side.

While at the site I found myself experiencing the same feeling I had that night of the Guthrie opening. I felt as if I was standing in the middle of a convergence of harmonious diversity hoping that I was witnessing the beginning of a trend, not just a sudden and fleeting moment.

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