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Threshold v2.0

2010-05-03T06:00:00.004-05:00

From all of us here at Threshold, thank you for reading! We hope you have enjoyed our coverage of regional design issues, and we're excited to announce the beta version of our new site...THRESHOLD: Where Landscape, Architecture, and Interior Design Meet.

We are forming partnerships with AIA-MN, MASLA, and ASID-MN to include more viewpoints on more issues of the built environment, and we've designed a brand new site to help make that happen.

We will continue to showcase (and expand) the contributions from regional design voices, and we hope you will join the conversation at www.thresholdblog.org.

The "old" Threshold will gradually be abandoned, so please visit the new Threshold for details on our official "launch" event.

Thanks!

A Virgin Forest Grows In the Bronx

2010-04-24T17:52:00.004-05:00

Image courtesy Jennifer Harris

When I say “Bronx” images of the arson induced urban blight of the ‘60s and ‘70s is probably the first thing that comes to mind and with good reason. The chaos inflicted on the borough during that time left it scarred for almost 30 years. It remains the home of one of the five poorest congressional districts in the country, but generally, the image of the Bronx has transitioned from one of decay to one of rebirth. It is home to one of the best public high schools in the country (Bronx Science), one of the largest zoos in the country (Bronx Zoo), and a preeminent botanical garden (New York Botanical Garden).

Image courtesy Jennifer Harris

The New York Botanical Garden is host to plant research laboratories, living plant collections, plant exhibitions, and covers 250 acres of land along the Bronx River.
Atop 50 of these acres lives a collection of Oak, Beech, Cherry, Birch, Tulip, and White Ash trees. These trees are virgin forest, a concept I have yet still to fully grasp. I am not sure if I am surprised that virgin forest still exists in the city or that there is so little of it left. Both ideas seem to induce the same level of incredulity.

The part of me that grew up the son of a forester almost literally in the middle of the Richard J. Dorer Memorial Hardwood Forest is stunned by the fact that so little native flora remains. The part of me that has lived in New York City for the past four years cannot believe someone had enough foresight to save any of it.

Image courtesy www.nybg.org

Bearden Place Competition | Jay Isenberg

2010-04-19T21:23:00.003-05:00

As I write this, Twin Cities architects are hurriedly completing their submissions (due Wednesday) for Bearden Place: A Housing Competition in the Artists' Core. If you're hearing about this for the first time, it's probably too late to enter, but I'd love you to follow our progress as we re-envision vacancy in Minneapolis. In the meantime, I thought a little background might be interesting.

The Competition is a natural outgrowth of my interest and recent work in creating situations where architects are challenged to engage creatively, yet differently in the social, political and cultural forces that shape our environment and impact our work.

I had been a consultant for the Family Housing Fund and had been spending time with the Willard Homewood neighborhood group guiding them in efforts to visualize the housing situation in their immediate neighborhood using GIS mapping techniques and graphics. The housing crisis was in full throttle, this neighborhood was very committed to rebuilding itself, and there was a dearth of new ideas coming from the usual suspects. I would drive by this vacant site on the corner of Plymouth and Sheridan Avenues North and think what a great opportunity this would be for a project that would demonstrate all the best intentions of the many people and groups I had come across who were working so hard to combat the housing crisis. This group included architects, and it was not a great leap to think what might happen if a design competition was held and dozens of architects had the opportunity to bring their collective skills and creativity to bear upon the site and the conditions that allowed such an important piece of the neighborhood to remain empty.

My motivations and intentions with this competition are as numerous as the disparate parties involved, which include the City, the Builders, the neighborhood, and the design community. However, each in their own way shares an overriding desire to support a project that demonstrates the possibility of great, affordable and sustainable housing design that would serve as the benchmark for future inner city development efforts. Finding the magic balance among the design submissions that most likely allows for the construction and successful sale of all units will be the charge and duty of the jury.

I'm particularly interested in whether a process defined by partnering, collaboration and identification of shared goals can deliver something superior to the traditional development process, where architects and the community are asked to respond directly and specifically to a single development proposal and it's goals. While we are very good at this, I believe architects are called upon in too limited a manner and circumstance. I want architects at the table where policy making discussions occur and in other public situations that could benefit from design thinking and problem solving.

I hadn't heard of Romare Howard Bearden (1911-1988) before this competition, so I was pleased to be introduced to his work and history. We were seeking a name for the competition that wasn't too dry, too literal, or too much like a bad TV sitcom. It had to reflect the passion and hope of the residents who were trying to rebuild their neighborhood, who had branded it the "Artists' Core" and were hoping to attract young, vibrant, arts-oriented people to come purchase and revitalize the solid housing stock that still existed.

Romare Bearden was suggested as the appropriate namesake and whose most noted works are his large collages, the most notable being "The Block" which graces the pages of the Competition Program. His legacy is represented by the Bearden Foundation and fortunately they have given us permission to use his name and images for this project and are very interested in the outcomes. You can see his multifaceted work and find out more about this influential African American artist, educator, scholar, and social activist at the Bearden Foundation website.

Big Shop of Wonders

2010-04-08T13:51:00.003-05:00

Workshops fascinate me. I have always had some sort of workshop access, my grandfather had a hardware store in California, and although he had retired when I knew him, I still have tools and even a large box of screws and bolts from the store. Almost every place I have lived, no matter how small or mobile had some sort of shop or bench or box or packet with tools and materials to make stuff. Now I have a bigger and better and faster workshop, and still, whenever I walk into someone else’s workshop, especially one that has been occupied for some time, I get a grin on my face and start poking around, asking questions about tools, materials, projects, and the inevitable detritus that accumulates.

One of the first really great shops I had the pleasure to work in was at the Walker Art Center, when I worked on the crew. The crew built out the galleries for new shows, framed the pieces of art, built display furniture, installed shows and built some of the most beautiful crates for shipping and storing artwork I have ever seen. People on the crew were artists and craftsmen, all highly skilled and educated and working there because it gave them a chance to interact closely with the art and artists. We had a pretty nice shop, fairly spacious and with good tools, that enabled us to build most anything we needed for a show. The pay was terrible, they camaraderie great and the work we did was beautiful.

I stopped by the shop of a friend from those days, Willie Willette, recently and got the same goofy grin. His shop, Willie Willette Works, is huge, plenty of room for him and his four employees to move around, to store projects and materials. It was the materials that first widened my grin. Arrayed along one wall were slabs of natural edged wood, some of the mating pieces book-matched, waiting for the right client and inspiration. There were also a few scraps of what had been a load of 16 foot pieces of walnut, nearly two inches thick. Most of these had been turned into a huge table, the top of which showed the true nature of these beautiful pieces of wood. It is part of entire office suite, designed in a minimalist style, with a Loosian lack of ornament, which allows the beauty of this material to shine through. In the same room, hanging on pegs, Shaker style, were prototypes and a final version of the Melissa chair, Willettes dining chair. It is always great to see the process of design, and when that process is arrayed before you full scale, the steps taken become even clearer.

Willie and crew don’t just build to spec, they are involved in the design process. As I was poking around the shop, people were busy sanding, scribing, sawing and designing. They work collaboratively with architects and designers and seek those kinds of jobs. Everyone here has had some formal education in design, most at MCAD (one of the workers I had had in an architecture class I taught there). So they are all skilled designers as well as artisans. The work shows it as does the pleasure they obviously get from the design process. Here, like at the Walker, it is not the promise of profit that motivates one, but the inherent satisfaction that comes from working with bright and capable others to produce something functional, beautiful and well crafted.

A Clinic on Urban Form

2010-04-06T13:55:00.008-05:00

Rochester, MN, is known for the Mayo Clinic, and rightfully so – though not in my opinion because of the international medical reputation, but because of urban design. The major Mayo buildings sit right downtown, within the city’s rectilinear street grid. They’re a perfectly mismatched blend of styles and histories that together seem more like a city than a campus (in the traditionally uniform sense).
Annenberg Plaza with four medical buildings: Mayo in the left foreground, Gonda in the left background, Plummer in the right foreground, and Siebens adjoining the Plummer.

Some of the streets have become plazas, but the grid is still there, and almost every building has an unexpected indoor-outdoor relationship. The Siebens Building’s ground floor is below street level, but angled windows allow the Annenberg and Peace Plazas into the atrium.
From the Plummer Building looking out on Annenberg Plaza.

The Gonda Building’s lofty Nathan Landow Atrium actually carves the land away, creating inside and outside lounge space below the bustle of the street. On the main level, expansive windows show off Rochester’s urban form.
The Nathan Landow Atrium, from the main (street) level.

Perhaps most strange is the Mathews Heritage Dome, which sits at the edge of Annenberg Plaza. This glass oculus provides a sky view to a lower level lounge, but also allows pedestrians outside to peek down into the building.
Peeping into the Mathews Heritage Dome, with the reflection of the Gonda Building superimposed on the lounge below.

The Mayo Clinic’s commitment to Rochester is well known, but I was struck with its commitment to that city’s urbanity. When it expanded over the years, this health institution could have easily decamped to a woodsy, ravine-studded estate in the hills outside of town. Instead it has created, through building placement and design, a venue that is as much about the city as it is about the clinic.

MSCED - Brock Davis at Creative Electric

2010-04-01T08:08:00.000-05:00

If an artist has a successful enough career, at some point people start to look through everything they did: Notes, sketches for ideas, unfinished projects, etc. I tend to really appreciate the fragments and pieces found on the side roads of an artist’s life and work even though it’s possible the artist never intended to share them. It feels like I can get closer to a body of work. I’m also a big believer that the failures in life and work generally teach us more than the successes.

On January 1st 2009, Minneapolis artist/designer Brock Davis started a project called “Make Something Cool Everyday”, which he did, for the whole year. Starting May 1st, you can see all 365 pieces of art on display at Creative Electric Studios in NE Minneapolis. Some are awesome, some probably not fully developed; some probably wouldn’t have made the cut in a different context. Seeing all the pieces together reminds me of what the work of an artist is really about: to see or imagine the world differently. And that’s a process, not a single act.

Brock was kind enough to answer a few questions about this project and his work.

Matt Olson - Can you talk a little bit about this project/show “Make Something Cool Everyday? “ What went into deciding to approach your work this way?

Brock Davis - I’m excited about the show. It took a couple of months of planning to figure out how best to present the work. I wanted viewers to get a sense of the timeline of the work, so that walking through the exhibit is like going through each day. All 365 pieces are going to be arranged in the geometric shapes of the calendar months of 2009. I then chose some standout pieces from each month and those pieces will be arranged around the 12 calendar cubes throughout the gallery.

MO - Do you see this year long project as one single work? Or are the individual pieces important to you as single works? Or both?

BD - I see it as both. There were some pieces that developed through the process that could stand on their own, but those pieces were birthed from the overall project, so I keep them attached. Whenever I would stumble upon something that was extendable, it was a good feeling as it gave me an idea of what the next few days would bring. Then those pieces would run their course and it was time for something new. The toughest part was thinking of a new idea. There were many times where I would look at the clock and I would only have an hour left in the day and I still had no idea what I was going to make. I always try to seek something original, which is almost impossible, but just trying to come up with something original can lead to some interesting ideas.

MO - How did this or might this project affect your practice in the future?

BD - A project like this shows all your sides, your consistencies, strengths, weaknesses. It pushed me into media I don’t usually work in, like sculpture and collage. It brought me back to media I haven’t done in a while, like sketching and painting. But I think the most important thing I learned was to pay more attention to my immediate surroundings and realize the creative potential in everyday, ordinary objects and situations. Most of the works in this project are pieces created in my house based on daily observations. Whether I was shaving, staring at a dead fly in a spider’s web or looking at a garden hose in the back yard. This project also taught me to work more efficiently and quickly. I tend to be obsessive-compulsive when it comes to execution, and in the past I would toil for longer periods of time over ideas and executions. This project was kind of like having a job. I would punch in every day and have to have something made (hopefully something interesting) by the end of the day. That pressure and schedule helped me to work more quickly and efficiently.

MO - Who are some of your favorite artists? Architects?

BD - Thomas Heatherwick is probably one of my favorite modern day inspirations...I also like Kim Hiorthoy, Brian Wilson, Stefan Sagmeister, Charley Harper, Paul Rand...and many more.

You can see the all the work created in this year long project here, but I recommend seeing the show for real:

“Make Something Cool Everyday” by Brock Davis - Presented by Creative Electric Studios at the California Buliding Gallery, 2205 NE California Street, Mpls MN

Saturday May 1st Through May 22nd Saturdays 10am-2pm or by Appointment
Opening Reception Saturday May 1st from 6:30 - 11pm

In Plain Sight | St. Anthony Park Library

2010-03-30T22:30:00.000-05:00

Three Carnegie libraries opened in St. Paul in 1917 – Riverview, Arlington Hills, and St. Anthony Park – and all three were designed by the St. Paul City Architect's office. While they're almost identical, it's the St. Anthony Park branch which gets a clear geographical advantage. Located at the triangular intersection of Como and Carter Avenues, the stately facade is given a proper vantage point and park-like space from which it can be appreciated.

Furthermore, the library's proximity to local schools, universities, and housing make it the system's 5th busiest. In 2000, architect Phillip Broussard designed the addition of a children's reading room in the shape of a rotunda--perfectly complementing the classic geometry of this neighborhood gem.

Transplanted: Quarantined

2010-03-25T23:55:00.013-05:00

The current exhibition at the Storefront for Art and Architecture is entitled “Landscapes of Quarantine.” The pieces exhibited are a product of a design studio organized by Geoff Manaugh, of BLDGBLOG fame, and Nicola Twilley from Edible Geography and they range from the humorous, to the informative, to the contemplative. Two of my favorite pieces were by Mimi Lien and Amanda and Jordan Spielman. Mimi Lien’s contribution was a series of four metal boxes each with a singular peep hole through which you could view a scale model of a quarantine environment. The visual distortion and limited views created by the peep hole gave the scale environments a heightened sense of isolation. One couldn’t help but think about how horrible it would be to call one of these places home. Amanda and Jordan Spielman’s NYCQ uses a series of satirical posters and pamphlets to offer helpful tips on how to both avoid quarantine and how to cope with it if you are unlucky enough to be sequestered. The imagery and graphics strike an amusing balance between propaganda and those motivational posters you see in corporate offices.

Mimi Lien's Hotel III

Selection from Amanda and Jordan Speilman's NYCQ

In terms of the gallery space, the bold move of painting the entire floor orange was inspired. The light bounces off the floor and causes the interior surfaces to emit an eerie glow. The warm color transcends the diagrammatic. It creates an environment.

As you exit, an exhibition brief makes many salient points, and the following resonated with me:

"At its most basic, quarantine is a strategy of separation and containment—the creation of a hygienic boundary between two or more things, for the purpose of protecting one from exposure to the other. It is a spatial response to suspicion, threat, and uncertainty.”

My mind transitioned from thoughts about the designs generated by quarantine to a quarantine generated by lack of design. The death of the small town in America is well documented. As the population and tax base flow elsewhere an enormous design vacuum is left in the wake. I think about my parents and friends who love living in a small town, but increasingly those small towns are void of any meaningful place. There is less money to build interesting things and more apathy to fight the nonsense that is constructed. This leads to a widening chasm between the “city” and the small town. The “city”, with its eye on urbanity and available funds to create things, tends to develop a superiority complex towards the small town, and this, in turn, creates resentment in the small town about the “city”. Each entity builds a zone of quarantine around it, mentally speaking, to protect it from the other.

Maybe this is the only way for each environment to maintain its own homeostasis? The elements that sustain them differ greatly. Perhaps there is a need for a separate branch of design professional? A branch fully devoted to the re-visioning of small towns. One willing to adopt small town ways of commerce (i.e. bartering of labor and goods, operating on limited debt) in lieu of a check that gets direct deposited bi-monthly. Are we willing to do that? Am I?

Heather Beal | Prius Payback: Is it Time to Return A Favor?

2010-03-15T06:36:00.010-05:00

I may be mildly mad for venturing anywhere near the controversy surrounding the “sudden and unintended acceleration” experienced by drivers of several makes of Toyota cars. No one really needs such a poignant and painful reminder of how important safety is for all designers. And yet, I can’t shake the feeling that this is an opportune moment for building industry professionals to return a big favor.

I began to realize the extent to which Toyota’s Prius, in particular, had inspired innovation in the building industry during an interview with Jeff and Salena Gallo in early 2009. When I asked what had motivated them to make sustainability a top priority for the home they’d had custom designed and built on the west edge of Minneapolis, they replied: “the Prius.” Buying a car that helped them reduce their use of fossil fuels made them wonder how their new home could accomplish the same goal.

Several months later I encountered a second example of how technology popularized by the Prius was spreading by contagion in the building industry. In a presentation for the Commonwealth Club, LivingHomes Founder Steve Glenn discussed how his Prius’s ability to present real-time data via easy-to-understand graphics inspired him to collaborate on development of a web-based, “dashboard” monitoring system for the sustainable, starchitect-designed, modular homes his company produces. Glenn didn’t stop with energy use. The LivingHomes dashboard also monitors water use, enables homeowners to calculate their carbon footprint, and provides payback information for the green technology options. This additional data will be especially valuable now that “CALGREEN,” the first statewide green building code in the nation, has been approved.

When I returned from California, a tour of a new dorm on Carleton College’s campus in Northfield, Minnesota brought Glenn’s words -- “any system with feedback tends improve” -- back to mind. Fred Rogers, treasurer for the College, ended the tour by demonstrating how an interactive digital display screen in the dorm’s main vestibule provided up-to-the-minute information about energy and water use. The database and graphic interface had been designed to spur the naturally competitive spirit of college students by enabling them to compare resource use totals by floor and by building.

Of course, three examples does not a trend make. I was ready to chalk all this up to coincidence when I noticed a bucket full of buttons at a GreenBuild 2009 that announced: “It’s about the Prius.” I think about that mantra whenever a new story about the Toyota recall airs.

Could there be a better time for people with “design minds” in the building industry to pay inspiration forward (or backward)?

For example, since the Prius falls under the “Floor Mat Pedal Entrapment” defect category I’ve wondered if walk-off mats installed in sustainably designed buildings could be adapted to improve both safety and indoor air quality in automobiles. Couldn’t ridged grilles be set into a recessed collection pan so that mud could be scraped from the bottom of your shoes when you climb into a car? These “mats” wouldn’t get trapped under the accelerator pedals because they’d be screwed into place. Car owners could simply remove the grilles and vacuum the dirt and debris out of the collection pan.

So…what helpful, creative ideas do you have? I’d love to hear them – and to learn what inspired your interest in sustainable design.

It’s a Math, Math, Math, Math World

2010-03-11T12:30:00.010-06:00

“Geometry is the knowledge of the eternally existent”- Plato
For the past few years I have been teaching a math class, Visual Geometry, at the College of Visual Arts in St. Paul, something that would come as a shock to any of my previous math teachers. I agreed to lead the class for a couple of reasons, one that a major part of the class was teaching orthographic drawing, something I had been doing for a number of years (and I was trained as an architect so I believed I could teach anything). The other part of the class--and the most fundamental--was a study of geometry and numbers in what is one way a very simple level, and in another asks the students to consider the concepts that form the very core of all mathematical, physical and cosmological thinking.

When I started teaching, ten years ago, my first class was an introductory architectural drawing class that covered both observational and scaled orthographic drawings. As an introductory class, the students were diverse in the skill and experience they had. Many had had drafting classes, but few were comfortable with observational drawing. Getting them to see and to draw what they see was the main thrust of the class. The Visual Geometry is very different; most of the students are very accomplished in observational drawing, and wary of math.
In the College of Visual Arts class, we approach geometry in much the way the ancient Greeks did, developing fairly complex figures constructed with only a pencil, compass and unmarked straight edge. We do proofs, but they are visual proofs. We draw square roots (starting with, of all things, a square). We explore the mathematical nature of the growth of plants, the shape of diatoms, chemistry, physics, art and the universe as a whole. I think this approach to mathematics increases the accessibility for non-scientists to understand the current thinking about roots of math and science.

It also hearkens back to the days when a learned person had a wide breadth of knowledge and was able to see the interconnectedness of art, math, music, and the movement of the planets. One of the final assignments for my class is an open ended creative project, where the student is to apply and explore these concepts in an artistic endeavor. I receive a wide variety of projects, from paintings and prints to music and clothing. The quality and depth of course range widely, but I usually see a spark of interest and understanding generated. Even more gratifying is when students bring these ideas into their studio projects, often with great success. I believe designers should be well versed in the fundamentals of how the universe works, and with the easy and accessible variety of writings and websites devoted to the subject, there is no excuse not to imitate the Greeks and put this sort of knowledge at the center of our creative thinking.

Below are links to sites and books that are written for the lay person and are a good entry to understanding what are both the early fundamentals of mathematics and the newest thoughts on math and science.

Gödel, Escher, Bach, by Douglas R. Hofstadter, published over thirty years ago, opened the door to the kind of writing that allows those uninitiated into the arcane mysteries of science to develop understanding of the major ideas at work in mathematics, including its role in music and art.

The Road to Reality, by Roger Penrose, who developed an aperiodic tiling system, delves deeper into mathematics and physics

Math Forum has a good list compiled by G. Brandenburg of MIT is available from the website.

Also, the popular media has been doing more reporting on the cutting edges of our understanding of the universe especially around such interesting and possibly terrifying subjects such as CERN’s Large Hadron Collider and Minnesota’s own Soudan Underground Laboratory. These sites do a good job of explaining the science behind what is being looked for in these large experiments designed to study the smallest particles.

Mod Minn(ies): From Humble Beginnings

2010-03-09T15:13:00.010-06:00

All Photos By Timothy Hursley

As a designer at Shelter Architecture I have the opportunity to work with some fun modern design ideas. Recently, John Dwyer, founder of Shelter, lent his affordable housing expertise to assisting other architects in Biloxi as we worked with Architecture For Humanity's Biloxi Model Homes program. This project meant that we received numerous plan sets for new single-family home prototypes to be built in East Biloxi, and John made numerous trips South on behalf of AFH to insure each was built properly. These houses are designed to reinvent how homes are built in flood prone areas and to meet FEMA's guidelines for hurricane resistance. The most difficult challenge posed by the project was raising a home off the ground 12 feet, disrupting the vibrant porch culture so important in Gulf Coast communities. One particular home design that tackled this issue and stood out from the other homes in the project was Marlon Blackwell's Porchdog house.

Gulf Coast regions are slowly recovering from Katrina, but perhaps one of the worst remnants will be the transformation of vibrant street culture into something that is more remnant of the underside of a wharf. Regardless of the dazzling work lofted above the street-scape, the reality below is nothing short of foreboding. Porchdog refused to disrupt cultural tradition; instead, they designed a simple metal-clad home that cantilevers from an enclosed stair and storage volume all tied to the ground by a massive concrete stoop. This simple strategy left behind the pilloti-driven paradigm and unified structure and culture in a single but powerful move. The result is a home that is structurally spectacular, but still open and airy below, inviting neighborhood parties and spontaneous gatherings that were so common in pre-Katrina Biloxi. However, it's a reinterpretation of architectural culture which is far away from nostalgic ideas we frequently expect from the more typical 'New Urbanist' interpretations of a cultural landscape.

The story of this 1,500 square-foot home's evolution is not a fairly tale. The humble $115,000 price-tag, made possible by Oprah's Angel Network, was certainly limiting, but rocky planning and corrupt contractors made the process even more difficult. Regardless, the design team and the third and final contractor, Herbie Holder, fought for more than two years to insure this home for a single father and teenage son was complete. The interior is a simple open plan opening onto a very large second-story porch connecting this elevated home to the outdoors. The second staircase leads to the third floor with two modest bedrooms both with floor to glass windows. These East and West facing rooms can be made hurricane safe, and private, by operable metal screens which can be retracted at any time.

Despite the difficulties of construction, this project was well worth the battles to the proud owners and Blackwell's office. With its clear, potent design, it recently made the short list at the London Design Museum as an architectural finalist for the Brit Insurance Design Awards. This single-family American home rubbed shoulders with Pritzker-Prize winning architecture such as Zaha Hadid's new MAXXI in Rome and Herzog & de Meuron's TEA cultural complex in Portugal. It is a wonderful example of how truly spectacular modern work can be propagated from the least likely of projects, regardless of scale and budget. In a recent interview with Threshold, Jonathan Boelkins the project manager for Porchdog from Marlon Blackwell Architect summed up the impact that these inventive small humanitarian projects can have, "Every project has potential and dignity-- even something so small can have that much breadth."

To find out more please visit Architecture For Humanity’s Open Source Architectur e website.

Exploded View: Opposing Thumbs at Art Of This

2010-03-04T09:07:00.016-06:00

I’m kind of surprised and even a bit baffled that David Bohm, the quantum physicist, keeps coming to mind in relation to the current show at the Art Of This gallery in Minneapolis. Why? Well it’s probably because I don’t really know much about him or quantum physics. I’m not sure but I’m guessing it’s the little bit I know about his beliefs in the interconnectedness of all things, and what that means in terms of relationships and communication between people.

The show, Opposing Thumbs, is a mixed media installation that fills the entire gallery. It is the first collaborative work between the gallery’s co-directors, artists David Petersen and John Marks. For four years, the two have worked together to create one of Minneapolis’s best spaces for contemporary work, with a tendency towards social practice and conceptual art.

The show’s press release describes Petersen and Marks journey together with words like “discord” and “economic strife.” It speaks of “disagreements regarding aesthetic, conceptual, political and philosophical concerns”, even calling out each of their “distinctive self-destructive behaviors”. Even though there was a tone of humor to it all, on the drive over I couldn’t help but develop a romanticized vision of their relationship, and from that, develop a sense of what I thought the work I was about to encounter might feel like. I half expected a series of works that were cathartic, complicated and dark. Of course, I could not have been more wrong.

Opposing Thumbs was, in part, born of the recent home improvement projects both artists have been struggling with in their own dwellings. Most of the materials are either remnants of, or reflect Home Depot style remodeling projects, that is to say, textiles of the lowest order. Right at eye level, where many galleries might hang framed paintings, two foot strips of differently patterned wallpaper connect to form a continuous band around the gallery, no doubt a commentary on painting itself. While there is a certain momentum to the patterns as they make their way around the room, where they connect, they almost feel randomly chosen. Two jagged sculptures in the middle of the room, the same color as the floor, lean towards what the eye can’t help but gravitate to, a large colorful and busy, but still gentle video projection. The reflection it makes in the window seems to take the space of the gallery almost to the street. Two opposing ramps covered in carpet are centered by gilt framed video pieces. The room feels light, but dense. There is a narrative present, but it might be different to anyone who experiences it. I was absolutely struck by the smart, playful and esoteric tone of the room. I loved being in the space and can’t recommend it enough.

Upon reflection though, it might be the sound piece and Petersen’s admission that he didn’t really like it, fearing that it was “maybe too reverent”, that is most interesting to me. They came to a perfect compromise with it. The four minute audio of what sounds like a vague, ethereal, distorted choir is followed by four minutes of silence. It becomes the perfect anchor to my memories of a room filled with geometry that seemed to answer and mirror itself in abstract ways all over the place, as with the fake painted lattice adjoined to real lattice… a strange balance exists.

Maybe that’s where David Bohm comes in. The writer Jim Belderis said of Bohm “His realizations give intimations of an infinite hierarchy of ever deeper implicate and superimplicate orders, each one enfolded in the level that underlies it. And these flow endlessly into the unknowable ground of being.” It makes me think of the didactic for Opposing Thumbs, which concludes with the sentence “Because if there is a goal, it would be not to conclude and resolve, but rather to continue with the challenge that is continuing. “ And thus by continuing, each “answer” that Petersen and Marks arrive at only creates more questions. Which is just like great art.

Opposing Thumbs closing reception happens Saturday March 6th 7-11pm.
Art Of This gallery is located at 3506 Nicollet Ave, S. Minneapolis MN

Gopher Prairie

2010-03-02T14:27:00.007-06:00

Native Minnesotan Sinclair Lewis wrote the following in 1920. City-girl Carol Kennicott was playing urban designer to one of many unwilling townsfolk.

She had sought to be definite in analyzing the surface ugliness of the Gopher Prairies. She asserted that it is a matter of universal similarity; of flimsiness of construction, so that the towns resemble frontier camps; of neglect of natural advantages, so that the hills are covered with brush, the lakes shut off by railroads, and the creeks lined with dumping-grounds; of depressing sobriety of color; rectangularity of buildings; and excessive breadth and straightness of the gashed streets, so that there is no escape from gales and from sight of the grim sweep of land, nor any windings to coax the loiterer along, while the breadth which would be majestic in an avenue of palaces makes the low shabby shops creeping down the typical Main Street the more mean by comparison.

Lewis’ “Main Street” is often lauded for being way ahead of its time in exposing the societal, economic, and political ills of the nation’s small towns. When I plunged in a few weeks ago, I never expected to find such a treatise on town planning, architecture, and natural resources. Today, of course, these small town Main Streets that Carol dislikes so vehemently are being re-created amidst the suburban sameness that is perhaps Lewis’ true prophesy.

Nine-tenths of the American towns are so alike that it is the completest boredom to wander from one to another. Always … there is the same lumber yard, the same railroad station, the same Ford garage, the same creamery, the same box-like houses and two-story shops. The new, more conscious houses are alike in their very attempts at diversity: the same bungalows, the same square houses of stucco or tapestry brick.
At the moment of this rant (half-way through the book), Carol has repeatedly tried to stir the town to action. She has dreamed of a new city hall, an excellent Georgian layout of the town, and even housing programs for poor immigrants. She has been rebuffed at every turn. She is an outsider who, the townsfolk say, should rather focus on making her husband happy. She is by now exasperated

The remedy? Is there any? … The trouble is spiritual, and no League or Party can enact a preference for gardens rather than dumping-grounds.

Carol continues at length about the frightening power of these small towns, but I won’t bore you here (it’s in chapter 22 section 7 and definitely worth a read). But Carol’s confidant, Vida Sherwin, shows her up, and along the way offers a process for change.

We’re going to have a new school building in this town…. We didn’t call on you because you would never stand the pound-pound-pounding year after year without one bit of encouragement.

Urban design—that is, the correlation of building and landscape – takes time: time banging one’s head against the wall, time cultivating relationships with the right people, time spent in town learning, listening, and then envisioning. How many of you have labored over a master plan only to see the “townsfolk” put it lovingly on a shelf. In “Main Street,” Carol saw the problem, but didn’t know the process (or, at least, underestimated the necessary fortitude). Have you had a similar experience?

mawr-fuh-sis

2010-02-23T22:23:00.015-06:00

As often as possible I try to take advantage of my general proximity to the many great design schools in New York. The lecture schedules of Columbia, Cooper Union, Pratt, and Parsons each semester offer myriad opportunities to view influential designers speak about what they do, how they do it, and why they do it. All of the designers are proficient at expressing their ideas and narrating their work, but Thom Mayne from Morphosis Architects lays raconteurial waste to all of them. He is simply brilliant (Disclaimer: I have a Dominique Francon-like attachment to Mayne if that’s not obvious by now).

The first time I heard him speak was a few years ago at Cooper Union where he was presenting the design for the “New Academic Building” which had just broken ground and was to be the new home for the schools of Engineering and Art at Cooper Union. The presentation was loaded with complex architectural theories and even more complex architectural diagrams both of which left me with a great feeling of anticipation for the finished product. This anticipation was only bolstered by my visit to the Morphosis designed Caltrans District 7 Headquarters building in Los Angeles this past fall.

So after visiting the new building at Cooper Union I can’t decide if I am a victim of self inflicted hype or if the building is a little underwhelming. I am sure, however, that my lower than expected level of awe is at least partially due to the fact that the building is not open to the public, denying me the opportunity to view the building as a whole. From the lecture it was obvious that the atrium and grand stair that traverse the full height of the building were crucial generative components in the conception of the project. The inability to experience this shall be my scapegoat for not being entranced by this building after my visit.

Like all Morphosis buildings the Cooper Union project is an interesting exercise in how to clothe architecture. A metal screen outer layer is draped over a straight-forward glass wall. Scattered patches of the screen wall are treated with a reflective coating. These areas create an added layer of contrast that, although it is only a coating on the screen, almost read as a separate surface. This added layer of contrast helps your eye read the undulating movement of the facade while the perforation in the screen gives the facade depth.

While the facade is well-executed and articulated, the manner in which the building meets and interacts with the sidewalk below is possibly the most successful piece of the project. In a city where the sidewalks are so highly used, enough cannot be said to the importance of the first ten to fifteen feet of a building. In the Cooper Union building the skin is folded slightly upward at its bottom edge creating a sheltered area for the sidewalk below. The building offers haven to pedestrians from wind, rain, sun, or snow. Out of this upturned edge the signage for the building emerges in a move directly adapted from the Caltrans building signage.

Critiquing a Morphosis project solely based on its façade is appropriate to an extent. A significant portion of their design energy is focused on the exterior of their projects. Nevertheless I feel obligated to experience the building as a whole if for no other reason than to decide if I need to start tempering my love for all things Morphosis. I see myself befriending a security guard in the near future.

In Plain Sight | Airport Art

2010-02-22T09:30:00.000-06:00

The airport isn't exactly known as a location for provoking deep thoughts, and if you've ever picked up an in-flight magazine, you've tasted bland, anonymous, and disposable all in one bite. Airports can be our introduction to an entirely new place, but beyond the security checkpoint, most are entirely placeless blurs of Eames tandem sling seating, coffee franchises, and USA Today.

However, given their enormous, partially taxpayer-funded budgets, airports are often required to allocate 1% of their funds to public artwork, and these works can help give each hub some semblance of a unique personality. So, in an industry where constant motion is to be expected, what do you hang on the walls to get noticed?

At one end of the spectrum are Leo Tanguma's controversial murals at Denver International (pictured above). The bold symbolism makes these pieces hard to miss, even on a hurried dash to the baggage claim. Despite names like “In Peace and Harmony with Nature,” and “The Children of the World Dream of Peace,” the vivid, vaguely socialist imagery has spawned a thousand conspiracy theories about nefarious government activity taking place deep underground, below the adjacent Starbucks. Not quite the reaction Tanguma was hoping for, but attention from attention-deficient travelers nonetheless.

At the other end of the spectrum is the installation at MSP's light rail terminal (pictured below). The stunning collection of Minnesotan scenes by St. Paul photographer, Chris Faust, is definitely a more recognizable (though perhaps less symbolic) way of introducing visitors to the Land of 10,000 lakes. His beautiful panoramic prints help romanticize our state's people, its industry, and even its climate. But do they say enough to leave an impression? Who really doesn't like seeing a small-town homecoming parade? Who really does?

I'm no frequent flier. Have you seen great (or not-so-great) examples of local artistry in international airports?

Suburban Archaeology #9: Ole Bessie and the Plowman

2010-02-18T08:08:00.002-06:00

My winter experiences have become a comic farce of navigating around typical suburban life that others seem to perform as rote routine while I, being born, raised and living my entire adult life in the nearly sub-tropical region of Gulf Coastal Mississippi, have pretty much become a Don Knotts movie character. I crashed on this planet Hoth six years ago and I am (believe it or not) still acclimating to this icy tundra during the Antarctic months. The laws of science, at least as I thought I knew them, seem not to apply here in winter. Things that I never could have envisioned freezing do freeze, and everywhere around me becomes a gigantic ice-skating rink.

Along with my unending quest for warmth, my equilibrium and common sense just go totally out the window during this time. Something as simple as jogging with the dog quickly becomes Sesame Street on Ice, as he drags me skating for dear life down slippery sidewalks. Typically, resulting in the predictable whack and thud of my landing square on my bottom. I find the hurt to my pride stings far greater than the cold wind full of needles stabbing at my cheeks, or even the blue mark that I'm sure is now gracing my frozen Southern keester. The skating around on snow boots is one thing, and certainly comical, but being an Olympic gold medalist at Jeep-sliding toward oncoming traffic can be a terrifying experience; leaving me questioning, “what the hell am I doing here?!?” In an era of heated seats and goose down comforters, the season is tolerable however and I do find enjoyment in several of its activities.

My least favorite has to be taking care of winter maintenance issues in Iceburbia. Our first year in Minnesota was spent living in a quasi-urban apartment and I must say that the biggest (and admittedly only) thing I miss from that year is having myself a daddy (The apartment maintenance guy). Furnace is busted? We'll send someone over. (Because I'll admit that being from Mississippi, I didn't even know what a furnace was.) With heated underground parking garages and no concern for shoveling anything but dinner into my mouth, those were kinda the salad days, winter-wise. Enter the suburban picture. Now, “Old Bessie” is my new daddy. A mammoth, twelve-year-old snow blower I inherited in a friend's divorce, this baby should have flames painted on her sides. I set my iPod to the Beach Boys' “409”, throw on my sunglasses and crank up what sounds like a drag racer in early burnout. The thrill of throwing snow in blasting fifteen foot columns makes me feel just like a kid again and I don't mind the fact that I can't feel my toes so much. That Tim Taylor-esque grunting you hear...that's me.

While I'm having the time of my life with the blower, the delicate interplay between me, my mailman and the city plow guy is something straight out of a John Hughes movie. The script would read a little something like this: Snow falls. David shovels driveway in early morning hours. Plowman shoves snow from street into David's driveway and in front of David's mailbox after David has already left for morning meetings. Mailman won't deliver David's mail because he can't reach mailbox and leaves David a note stating that David should consider shoveling his snow. David gets note and shovels out mailbox. Because it's been snowing all day, Plowman returns to shove more snow in front of David's mailbox just as David gets ready to shovel driveway again before dinner. It snows all night while David is sleeping...rinse, repeat. Rinse, repeat.

As a final note, I offer the illustrations as a gift from me to you. One Minnesotan (ahem) to another, just trying to get through the last throes of winter's icy grip together. I create my illustrations mostly by hand using primarily “architectural” means: utilizing technical pens and Sharpie markers on tracing and sketchpad paper, then by doing final renderings of color and some digital bits in Adobe Illustrator. Both the colors and geometries I employ when drawing people come out of a desire to render the human in an abstracted form, making for more whimsy and modernism, as well as to create a sense of communal sameness among all races and ethnicities. A little art always makes the cold days easier.

Mod Minn(ies): Modern Industry

2010-02-15T12:20:00.010-06:00

Left: Peter Behren's AEG Turbine Factory | Right: Herzog & de Meuron's Ricola Storage Warehouse (Photo: Margherita Spiluttini)

Many architects aspire to design modernist mansions and ground-breaking museums, forgetting that incredible work can be accomplished with less seductive structures. We must remember that simple industrial structures propelled the Modernist movement forward in the first place. If it weren't for Peter Barren's AEG Turbinenfabrik (Turbine Factory), designed at the turn of the last century, Modernism may have never begun. More recently it was Herzog & de Meuron's simple storage warehouse for Ricola in Basel, Switzerland, that refocused architecture away from literal ornamentation and exaggerated pediments towards explorations of modern materiality. In this same spirit of doing the most with what you are given, HGA's Steven Dwyer recently received an AIA Minnesota Honor Award for a wonderful and precise design for the Biomass Facility at the University of Minnesota–Morris.

The building is a simple yet elegant addition to the university's original power plant by the celebrated firm Cerny & Associates. HGA was initially selected for the firm's engineering expertise, to be led by principal Doug Moss, PE, seven years ago when the bio-mass facility project began. The building is not meant for human habitation. It houses a corn stove, used to grind and efficiently burn agricultural waste to capture heating energy for the campus. This requires a complex mechanical choreography of processing and gasification. Despite the ground-breaking technology housed inside, the building's design was intended to be a basic brick box to match the campus's design guidelines. When the project landed on Steven Dwyer's desk, at that time a junior designer, he knew it had more potential.

Inspired by the building's industrial purpose and the rural setting immediately beyond the facility, Dwyer advocated making the biomass facility a modern wood box. He felt strongly that the texture of that material would create the contrast necessary to play against the existing power plant's brick and make it possible to acknowledge the agrarian material fueling the campus's energy needs within. Because the building had strict sustainable design goals and a very limited budget, wood was also an affordable alternative to the original brick selections. The taught horizontal wood skin of the building changes texture at times to become vertical grill framed in galvanized steel, featuring the important crop material within. Other parts of the building need to be exposed the outside for safety and ventilation purposes; and here Dwyer used a finely-woven galvanized chain-link (see detail below) stretched in a matching steel frame that exposes the steel structure and complex mechanics within. The overall play of opaque to open makes this simple wood and steel box eye-catching. The playfulness of simple architectural composition becomes even more noticeable with a galvanized steel box window which penetrates from the western side of the building, a trick not typically possible in conventional buildings in Minnesota because of thermal issues.

HGA has realized a tailored work of architecture shaped from a decidedly industrial project. The lesson from it is that rich symbols of architectural culture can be fostered from the simple everyday elements of the industrial landscape. As architects we need to remind ourselves of those brief moments in our professional history when great works were invented from the most minimal building projects. We as designers need to try to help our clients see the potential in their everyday structures. Only with our diligence can these simple industrial boxes become experimental elements of culture.

If you're interested in learning more about the project, please check out Philip Koski's article in this months Architecture Minnesota Magazine.

My Ruskinian Epiphany

2010-02-11T13:05:00.015-06:00

“The highest reward for man's toil is not what he gets for it, but what he becomes by it.”
- John Ruskin

I have always been a sort of tool fetishist. As someone who has been making things all my life, I have routinely used all the power saws, drills, and gadgets common to standard construction.

The summer I spent carving a timber frame cabin changed all that. I was introduced to new tools, new for me at least. Some changes were simply a matter of scale—a 17” circular saw, for example, makes one look like a five year old with Daddy's Skilsaw. Other changes, however, drove a deeper and more fundamental change in my relationship with tools.

While the power tools we used were huge, fast and accurate, in many cases the joints needed to be finished with hand tools. The finish saw of choice was a Japanese pull saw which had a simple, long wooden handle, bound with rattan, and a very thin blade, often with crosscut teeth on one side and rip set teeth on the other. These saws required a completely different engagement with my body than a western saw. I would often finish my cut, sitting cross-legged on the workshop floor, gently pulling the saw through the fresh pine at a surprising pace. The change in motion, the less aggressive grip, the more passive motion of a pull rather than a push, being able to comfortably move all around the cut made me more aware of the movement of the blade through the wood. The focus was at once on the movement of your body in space, and the feel of the wood as the extremely sharp teeth cut through. There was a connection with the cut, the tool, the wood, and my body.

The structural system also called for a level of precision that could only be achieved with a simpler, sharper, and more primitive tool: the chisel. The timbers were laid out to the 32nd of an inch, pencil marks were too rough and were marked more precisely with a knife. The chisels were beautiful things. Some, Barr timber framing chisels, were nearly 18” long and 2” wide, while slicks were even wider and nearly three FEET in length. Kept scary sharp, it was rarely necessary to pound with a mallet, most often the chisel was carefully pushed through the wood, paring down to the knife mark. Again the focus was on the motion of my body, the feel of the chisel as it cut through the fibers of the wood, trying to keep the chisel flat, parallel, perpendicular or at the proper angle.

I think my tool epiphany came when I spent most of a day sharpening chisels. After grinding out the few dings and chips, I began flattening the backs, ten square inches of very hard steel, using Japanese water stones. The tools were large enough to preclude the use of guides; I had to use my whole body to try to get the very flat polishing motion, moving in a perfect plane. These motions follow through a series of finer and finer stones, ending in a 12,000 grit water stone that, if properly done, leaves a mirror finish on the blade. In polishing, one is entirely focused on the feel of the grit, however fine, pulling grains of steel from the blade; trying to keep exactly the same movement again and again. It becomes meditative, full of only movement and feeling, a process you can loose yourself in. Indeed, the nearly six hours I spent tuning our chisels seemed to pass unnoticed.

Since then, I am tending to go to the hand tools first, to work in a gentler, quieter, more precise way. Hand tools, because of the level of precision they can achieve, require a more intimate level of care, protecting edges, keeping them sharp and clean. I think at last my toil with tools has changed me, giving me Ruskin’s “highest reward”.

Can Smart Neighborhood Design Reduce Foreclosures? | Heather Beal

2010-02-08T19:43:00.005-06:00

In 1987, I bought a house before a car.

That was nearly a decade before the phrase “smart growth” was invented and no one knew what a carbon footprint was. I understood simple economics, though. Lending policies were strict and my budget constraints clear. My husband was in graduate school and my income was so low I calculated our loan limits in my head. Since we couldn’t qualify for both a home and an auto loan we found a house on a major bus route within walking distance of food and general merchandise stores, restaurants, and medical and dental offices. I used mass transit or joined a carpool to commute each day.

Fast-forward to the 21st century.

The neighborhood characteristics we chose for practical reasons are now in high demand and, according to industry experts, could play an important role in stabilizing the home mortgage market.

A report recently released by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) identifies “location efficiency” as a key predictor of mortgage default risk. Researchers analyzed more than 40,000 mortgages from three distinctly different areas across the United States: Chicago, San Francisco, and Jacksonville, Florida.

“The sum of the counties we looked at incorporates a variety of neighborhood patterns,” explains Jennifer Henry, with NRDC’s Center for Market Innovation, “from center city and central suburbs to outer suburbs and more rural areas.”

The study’s results show the probability of mortgage foreclosure decreased in location-efficient communities. These compact developments offer a range of transportation options, and have businesses that provide essential services and products nearby.

Since people who live in location-efficient communities are able to drive less they can spend a smaller portion of their income on purchasing, insuring, operating and maintaining vehicles. The fact that they can use mass transit, or walk, or bike to meet their basic needs also gives them more flexibility for adjusting their transportation costs when gas prices and household incomes fluctuate.

“We think this is good news”, Henry concludes, “because it indicates that by [considering] transportation costs and location efficiency we can improve our understanding of mortgage performance, structure better loans, and reduce the nation’s overall rate of foreclosure.”

Lending practices currently take into account the average 9% of household income that is spent on auto loans, yet total transportation costs have grown to constitute roughly 17% of the average United States household’s expenditures.

In other words, the “drive ‘til you qualify” approach to housing development is a fallacy. It’s time for a new “affordability” index – one that takes into account all household transportation costs.

For more information you can view a copy of the report at: www.nrdc.org.

Exploded View: David Lefkowitz

2010-02-04T10:33:00.013-06:00

We all have some guilty pleasures, right? One of mine is the wish that someday I'll be an art tourist: those folks who jet around on a whim to see art wherever it may be. Sadly, the closest I'll probably get to that lifestyle is my recent drive to the Rochester Art Center to see the fantastic David Lefkowitz exhibit Other Positioning Systems. Lefkowitz's work investigates the relationship between our direct experience of the world and the systems and structures we've constructed and use to make sense of it.

I first encountered the work of David Lefkowitz in the "Recent Acquisitions" show at the Walker Art Center a couple years ago, six small architectural drawings on cardboard from a series called "Improvised Structures." I was struck by their ambiguous relationship to space and scale, and their juxtaposition of material and theme.

Other Positioning Systems (now closed) was a retrospective and included works that played with security cameras, exposed what occurs behind the walls of a gallery, and displayed paintings of scenes from Lefkowitz's auto commute seen from the perspective of MNDOT camera views. There was a room full of "actual sized" paintings of very small things... and finally, the show culminated in a large gallery, where, in a series of works, the materials themselves become the most expressive part; a painting on wallboard in sheetrock compound, a large mural line drawing on wall where the lines were all made from sticks and branch twigs, a Styrofoam city.

Lefkowitz was kind enough to answer a few general questions about his work. Since I’m a novice at conducting interviews, I read a few conducted with artists I like. I was particularly taken by an interview with John Baldessari, whose work I feel has a conceptual link to Lefkowitz’s. [Read that interview here].

Because Lefkowitz explores perception, and asks us to question whether we're really seeing what we're seeing (or hearing), I asked him if I could copy some of the same questions from the Baldessari interview as an amusing conceptual frame. He was intrigued. Here's how it went.

Matt Olson - What led you to become an artist?

David Lefkowitz - Two things: 1. A Romantic ideal of the Artist as autonomous creative tinkerer- as someone who gets to spend a lot of time playing with ideas and experimenting with ways to give those thoughts concrete form. The reality isn’t quite so idyllic, but remarkably, it is part of the equation 2. A giddy skepticism about the truth/validity/authenticity of any representational image.

MO - I'm sorry, I hate to interject, but how tall are you?

DL - Not as tall as John Baldessari.

MO - You're so tall! It's amazing!

DL - As I said before, pictures can be deceiving.

MO - Who would you consider to be some breakthrough artists within the last decade?

DL - Was this a question to Baldessari too?

“Breakthrough” is a curious term to use here. It implies there was a barrier to certain artists/types of artwork that has recently been challenged, broken, circumvented. Now we’re in a really weird place/time-In a culture obsessed with novelty and spectacle, its hard to tell the difference between trendy and innovative. When ‘blurring boundaries’ is the normative strategy for artists, stubbornly conservative approaches can seem radical (though I am not convinced they really are). Given that caveat, If I extend the time constraint back to a couple decades, two relatively recent projects stand out for me as mind –expanding ventures.

First is Komar and Melamid’s efforts to determine the most and least wanted paintings in different countries. They hired a market research firm to conduct a survey about people’s aesthetic tastes, then made hilarious paintings based on the results. The project was simultaneously a critique of a corporate marketing approach to culture, and a paradoxically revealing picture of national character. You can read all about it here.

I also continue to marvel at the work of J.S.G. Boggs, who, beginning in the mid-‘80’s, would make meticulous drawings of U.S. and other currencies, and then proceed to try to ‘spend’ his drawings, always making clear that these were not actual bills, but drawings that he assigned the face value of the depicted money. The convoluted transactions themselves were the artwork, and they sharply revealed the way our whole economy is based on a consensus of faith in the value of scraps of paper (and now on digitized bits of financial information- which reminds me, I need to log on to Wells Fargo to ‘move money’ from savings to checking- see what I mean?). The creative non-fiction master Lawrence Weschler wrote a fantastic book about his exploits. It’s definitely worth checking out.

MO - Could you talk a bit about the "Improvised Structure" series of drawings the Walker Art Center acquired?

DL - Sure, they are watercolor drawings of structures made of cardboard boxes depicted on scrap cardboard. The images refer to utopian architecture- they exist only as plans, but they lack a connection to a grand plan, an overarching ideology. (Can one develop a planned unplanned-ness, an anti-Haussmann utopia?) The central organizing principle is formal and mundane- I depict a single structure, or small group of structures in linear perspective, usually seen at street level. Because they lack any surrounding context, they read as specimens- isolated examples of a form. Thus, attention is focused on their singularity.

They are “improvised” in that I draw them pretty much from scratch. I draw a lot of quick studies that function as general sources, but I am making them up as I go along. I like that something that seems as definitive as an architectural rendering can really be a quick notation of an idea. It contradicts standard assumptions about what improvisation means. I like using watercolor ’cause it’s fugitive, hard-to-control nature adds an element of happenstance to an otherwise rigid structure. I like that they embody two poles of the spirit of resourcefulness-using what’s available, plentiful, right in front of you. They suggest both an architecture of possibility: children’s forts- cardboard box as basic unit for play, invention, and an architecture of necessity: cardboard box as rudimentary shelter for the homeless.

MO - What architects or areas of architecture are you interested in and how do they relate to your work?

DL - Like lots of folks I know, I have an ambivalent reaction to the legacy of Modernism- I love the spirit of experimentation and the attention to the properties of specific materials you find in Mies’ structures (steel, glass) or Eero Saarinen buildings (poured concrete), but I’m not so fond of arrogant social engineering like Corbu’s Plan Voisin, and the zillions of cheap, alienating structures partially justified by their superficial resemblance to ideal Modernist forms. I ‘d make a case that that ambivalence is actually the subject of a number of things I’ve done, from the Improvised Structures I mentioned above, to Plan, the Styrofoam city model in Other Positioning Systems. I also really respond to architects who use unconventional, often throwaway materials, like Shigeru Ban, who has used sonotubes (not the concrete they’re usually filled with) as structural elements, and landscape architects who transform abandoned industrial sites like Peter Latz, who designed an amazing park in Germany that incorporates derelict blast furnaces. Locally, I love the way MS&R used the ruins of the Washburn A Mill to create the Mill City Museum. It’s not hard to see how these examples of repurposing materials and spaces most people would consider garbage relate to my work.

The Rochester Art Center show has closed, but Lefkowitz will have another solo show in May at Thomas Berry Fine Arts in Minneapolis, and will participate in group shows this spring and summer at the Phipps Center for the Arts In Hudson, the Bloomington Art Center, and the Weisman Art Museum.

Elsewhere in the Blogscape

2010-02-02T09:28:00.006-06:00

It's hard to write about the intersection of land and building in winter. That intersection tends to become a slippery, icy, stomp-your-boots, pile-your-coats-and-hats-and-mittens kind of space. So today I'll take a moment to highlight a couple of other landscape related blogs worth checking out. These are a few of my favorites. Are there any I missed?

Landscape Urbanism
landscapeandurbanism.blogspot.com/
From North Dakota State landscape architecture grad and current Portland, OR, resident Jason King comes this eclectic compendium of urban issues. Posts range from the quite long to the short and sweet. It’s all Jason, but his style is simple and readable. He’s also got a spin-off site called veg.i.tecture, which deals exclusively with (predictably) vegetated architecture (green roofs, living walls, etc.).

Interchange
www.planetizen.com/interchange
Residing on the well-respected urban planning website Planetizen, Interchange is a group blog that features “leaders in the field” tackling subjects in their bailiwick. There are 60 contributors, which may seem overwhelming, but Interchange manages to strike a good balance between regular content and not hearing from the same person over and over again. These are big names in the field, so worth a regular check-in.

Pruned
pruned.blogspot.com
This one is really fun to look at, with an always unpredictable mix of stuff. It used to be pretty regular, but posts have tapered off in the past few months. Please come back, Mr. Trevi.

Garden Visit
www.gardenvisit.com/blog/
The name is a little odd, I know, but this small-group blog is part of a website devoted to letting you know how you can get out and see works of landscape architecture and garden design (dear to my own wanderlust heart). I just discovered this one and haven’t read much, but it looks promising. It spans the globe and often takes a well-founded critical look at urban design issues (like, on January 27, why the cities with the best urban form don’t make the grade in terms of economic productivity – hmmm…).

Transplanted | How Well Do We Rebuild?

2010-01-30T12:28:00.005-06:00

Why is it that our efficiency to clean up after a disaster is in direct contrast to our efficiency to rebuild after a disaster? We seem to fully understand how to dispatch the cranes and bulldozers and trucks to cleanse the city, yet we struggle to direct them to expeditiously reconstruct the city. We deploy our armed forces to rescue our people yet we struggle to coordinate architects, engineers, and planners to rescue our cities. This is completely incongruous to me. If we as a people have the skill set for removing debris effectively we simply must have the ability to bring new debris back in the form of buildings and infrastructure.

The only explanation for the hole in New York City at Ground Zero, the dilapidated FEMA trailers still littering New Orleans, and the tent communities sure to remain in Haiti is that everyone agrees that the carnage of the aftermath must be cleared, but we are somehow incapable of agreeing on what should follow. Making the decisions to clean up is politically easy. Making the decisions as to what gets rebuilt, how it gets rebuilt, and who profits from the rebuilding has proven to be too difficult a task for our leaders.

Science tells us that earthquakes, hurricanes, and floods will be a constant variable in our lives as long as we inhabit this planet. Reality tells us that terrorism is not going away anytime soon either. So, then, we need a better strategy to deal with the destruction left in their wake as our current one is only partially and marginally effective. I, therefore, propose a Design Cabinet. This Cabinet would be independent of the one established in Article II, Section 2, of the Constitution, it would be chosen by the President, and would be constructed regionally into Northeast, Southeast, Midwest, Southwest and Southeast chapters. Each chapter would be composed of one of each of the following:
-architect
-cartographer
-civil engineer
-construction superintendent
-landscape architect
-urban planner

Each chapter must not include any of the following:
-lawyers
-any individual with more than two days of political experience in any capacity

The Design Cabinet would be charged with approving designs submitted by open competition. Their selections would be final and absolute.

A perfect system is a fallacy, but the lack of any system is intolerable and inhumane.

In Plain Sight | The Awkward Tower

2010-01-22T06:00:00.001-06:00

Not everyone is cool. Of the three unused water towers in Minneapolis—Kenwood, Washburn, and Prospect Park—Kenwood is clearly the nerd.

While each of the towers have fascinating stories (maybe for another time), it is only the 1910 Kenwood tower that appears to be set up for ridicule. As a 100-foot tall octagon, it has the burden of being the tallest and oddest structure in one of the city's most particular neighborhoods. Like an awkward medieval giant trying to blend in at the country club, the Kenwood tower is sandwiched between two luxury homes and it has no surrounding park (like the Witches Hat) or cul de sac privacy (like the Washburn Tower) to buffer it from the curious onlookers.

The Kenwood water tower isn't friends with any master architect and it doesn't dress in any recognizable style, which made it prime picking for developers trying to take advantage of its lucky location. Incredibly, they attempted to force a condominium makeover in the 1970s—a fight which, fortunately, brought sympathetic preservationists to the tower's defense and eventually achieved local historic designation in 1980.

Currently home to telecommunications antennae and civil defense equipment, the Kenwood water tower proves that your cool older brother can stop the bullies from picking on you, but you'll still be wearing that pocket protector.

A historic view from the top. Photo courtesy of Minnesota Historical Society.

Mod Minn(ies): S M L Design by Silvercocoon

2010-01-18T15:05:00.013-06:00

Sometimes the most intriguing work comes from designers tackling issues of varying scale within one office. One great example was America’s modern design studio led by Ray and Charles Eames, which produced some of our most beloved chairs, films, graphic design and architectural masterworks within a thirty year period. Charles Eames felt strongly that all issues of design were equally intriguing and relevant because “eventually everything connects.” In the same vein, husband and wife team Tia Salmela Keobounpheng and Souliyahn Keobounpheng run an eclectic design company together. In the mid-century modern spirit, they operate out of a 50’s rambler (featured in the May/June 2007 issue of Architecture Minnesota), and also work in a vintage 1966 Airstreamer--the Silvercocoon--creating a wide array of art, architecture, jewelry and products.

Before founding their own firm in 2001, Souliyahn worked for Ellerbe Beckett and Salmela Architect (David Salmela is Tia’s father), and now leads Silvercocoon’s larger architectural projects. Tia’s resume is more varied; she studied architecture at the UMN, worked as an interior designer for Ikea and Redlurered, and did PR for local design firms. Her experiences in retail lend an understanding of color, material and product design which translates into Silvercocoon products like the Modern Tannenbaum trees, ornaments and jewelry.
In a recent interview with Threshold, Tia explains their practice, saying “[w]e take a lifestyle approach to design” seeking to make the everyday a special occasion through design. Whether they are designing homes or attempting to create the perfect a pair of earrings, Silvercocoon celebrates that their work affects people on a daily basis.

Some of Silvercocoon’s most innovative work results from collaboration with others. Silvercocoon conspired with Coen + Partners on this carriage house in Saint Paul (Shown Above). While many of Tia’s ornaments and jewelry creations come from working with Feyereisen Studios and their laser cutting facilities. These collaborative endeavors are important to the Silvercocoon’s work because they sometimes reveal better ways of working. Tia explains about the evolution of her jewelry design, “I have discovered that I think best through a computer – I can solve the problems that are floating around in my head fastest this way and in many ways the laser cutting process still keeps my mind engaged and occupied with possibilities for new work.”

Silvercocoon is a great example of architects applying their design skills to diverse ideas and their approach brings bursts of creativity which have potential to generate the kind of innovation that – like the Eames chair - will be remembered in the design world for generations.

Tia's jewelry design will be featured in the VOLTAGE Fashion Show on April 16th at First Avenue, a great show pairing local live music and fashion.

Exploded View - Matt Olson "Scattered Light "

2010-01-14T08:54:00.006-06:00

If you've been following along with my Exploded View posts here, you may have noticed how much I talk about cross disciplinary actions. I think it's so important for designers, architects and other creative professionals to wander into art, music, fashion etc. to broaden and inform their context. I thought I should share an example of what that means to me and how I've built that into my life this winter.

ROLU, the design studio I co-founded six years ago, recently commissioned a work by ASDF, a collaboration between the artists Mylinh Trieu Nguyen and David Horvitz. Having been inspired by my own involvement with their work, the studio asked them to create something with a strong element of participation, involving anyone who was interested. We asked that the work encourage people to think about space and their surroundings in a new, broader way. They came up with Scattered Light: a participation based poster project and attendant photo exhibition (follow link for full description). The project culminates next spring with a show at Art Of This gallery in Minneapolis.

So with this post, besides my usual refrain encouraging you to try new things, get involved, see things differently, dod something you might not normally do... I'm giving you an opportunity to do just that, as you are invited and encouraged to participate in Scattered Light.

I really hope you do.

Suburban Archaeology #8: Social Networking Is the New Morning Coffee

2010-01-10T22:02:00.001-06:00

From my childhood I can easily recall morning gab sessions between my mother and her neighborhood girlfriends over coffee in our kitchen. Those gals would pop over, hair in curlers and no makeup, after all the husbands had headed off to work and launch right into tales of neighborhood gossip and trade recipes for the evening's dinner. The gals would leave, my mother would roll quickly into makeup and an outfit and I would be carted off to school. The moments after that are unimportant to the story, because in that short hour between Dad leaving and me getting into the car for delivery, a whole cultural phenomenon had occurred. A way of life that my wife and others today will never know beyond their own childhood memories.

I recall my father enjoying a tranquility-inducing pipe with coffee and the morning newspaper at the table while I would partake in a big bowl of cereal. Every so often, I would receive over-the-paper winks and “I love you's” as a gesture that he was there and aware of me. Occasionally, I would receive the comics page as a way to replicate my Dad's morning routine. The energy at the table was relaxed, unhurried and pleasurable. It wasn't long in my life before my Dad would scrap this routine for a long commute out of the far-removed suburb where we ultimately settled; an unusually long commute even for the 1980s.

Today, the current parental generation is involved in a much different series of routines and social habits. Rapid-fire exchanges on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter have replaced the morning coffee gab sessions between the galpals. Devices like the iPhone have replaced the gentleman's casual routine of reading the morning paper at the family breakfast table before heading off to work. The convenience of technology; long, exhausting commutes and the pressures of the two income household with it’s hurried pace of contemporary lifestyles have created this tremendous cultural shift in our abilities to gather momentarily or to casually linger.

It's not that people and families don't get together anymore or stay connected, we just get together in different ways. In some ways, this new style of connectivity has helped to connect us even more. With moving away from the hometown now the norm, online social media has helped gals “have coffee” together from 1,000 miles away. Utilities like Skype have helped traveling Dads and grandparents stay connected to the kids from anywhere in the world. Phone applications like those for Associated Press and The Wall Street Journal allow Dads to be informed on-the-go of changes in the world and in their careers. Technological improvements have even allowed some Dads (like myself) to work from the home and never miss a beat of what's going on in the family; a luxury my Dad could've only dreamed of. Excuse me while I go Tweet that.

Tom Westbrook | Ringing The Sink

2010-01-06T22:02:00.022-06:00

One of my many pleasures when in the cabin is ringing the sink with my toothbrush while I brush my teeth. The sink in question is cast bronze, rough in appearance, with a nubbly texture on the outside and incised sketches of fish (we're on the North Shore, it has to have fish or a moose or bear) that rings with a clear and resonant tone when struck. The plastic base of the toothbrush seems to have the proper density and resilience to make a perfect striker. There is something calming, even Zen about that sound, loud in the small room.

The sink bowl was made by an artist just down the road, Tom Christiansen, sculptor, craftsman and all around great guy. With his partner Marcia Hyatt, he runs Last Chance Fabricating, a studio and gallery in Lutsen, MN. Here he makes cast bronze and welded steel sculptures and fixtures, most often with a humorous bent. The work Tom does is often collaborative, whether working with clients and designers to fabricate architectural elements and fixtures, working with other artists or simply getting a hand to deal with the weight, heat and all around danger in working with molten metal. His work ranges from “lost cardboard” cast bronze figures to memorial urns with wide ranging stops between.

I think one of the reasons I am so enamored of the sink is it seems to posses the same elemental nature that draws me to this place. The cabin I stay in is on the shore of Lake Superior where a spit ancient basalt lies just under the thin topsoil and juts out into the deep, cold lake. The sink itself is obviously born of fire. The room in which it sits is formed of heavy timbers, wood and slate, and can be rich with the scent of wet rock. Earth, air, fire and water, the elements of the ancients, which present themselves so powerfully in this place, hearken back to a time before organic life, to the time of the formation of our planet. It gives one the sort of centering feeling of insignificance that gazing at the stars can give. Here you can feel the weight of billions of years of history and the sink’s bell-like ring begins to sound like the music of the spheres.

A City Wrested

2009-12-31T11:07:00.005-06:00

From Thanksgiving Day to January 1st residents of New York City have their city taken away from them. A glut of tourists floods the streets, sidewalks, restaurants, and stores. The already pervasive congestion swells and pushes the patience and sanity of an already impatient and insane population to its breaking point. As anyone who has lived in a city like Washington, D.C., or Venice, Italy, will tell you, few things are more irritating than strangers meandering through your city listless and disoriented. Strangers who stop without warning in the middle of the sidewalk or street to snap a picture of a trash can, homeless person, or street sign with their cell phone. As a resident of New York, you realize there is nothing you can do about it. It is an inevitable spoonful of horrid tasting medicine you must simply shut up about, close your eyes, and swallow. There are simply too many strangers, and (even if you were not already late for something) you simply don’t have time to yell at all of them.

You also realize that the city you live in is utterly dependant on these strangers in some ways. They help keep the doors of the market you buy your lunch in every day open by purchasing food there to take to the park or back to their hotel room. They buy single ride subway tickets at a higher price which keeps the price of your monthly pass down. Simply their desire to visit your city gives it a cache few others share. You come to accept the fact that your city becomes the backdrop to countless photo ops. You accept that the buildings of Rockefeller Center become a Christmas tree stand and outdoor living room to hundreds of thousands of people you don’t know. Yet, you yearn for the quaintness and intimacy of Minneapolis’ Holidazzle Parade or the St. Paul Winter Carnival.

That said, you could not care less that literally a million people crowd into Times Square, stand for hours in the cold, and are sequestered between police barricades to watch a glass ball drop 77 feet. You like that. Perhaps it is because as a resident you don’t inhabit Times Square, ever. Perhaps it is because the amusement factor you get in contemplating what could ever make a person want to do such a thing far outweighs the frustration factor you feel when those same tourists impede on your everyday life. Ultimately, though, it is because you know that when the sun rises hours after that ball drops you will have your city back.

In Plain Sight | Holidazzle

2009-12-22T10:30:00.001-06:00

Each year, the holiday season brings a certain amount of expected repetition. Winter decorations will appear in stores around the 4th of July, someone will pick a fight about the politically-correct way to greet a stranger, and a “door buster” deal will actually result in busted doors-—or worse.

However, the holiday season also creates unexpected patterns of human behavior in the built environment. For example, each winter since 1992, thousands of spectators have braved the inhospitable Minnesota weather to watch the Holidazzle Parade make its way up Nicollet Mall. On a hectic street typically populated with over-stressed professionals attempting to cram an hour's worth of errands into a 15 minute lunch break, it is refreshing to see families 1) outside, 2) not running to go somewhere inside, and 3) smiling.

This attitude adjustment isn't limited to the street level, either. Typically, the skyways seem to host an unannounced human NASCAR race through their halls. If one would like to avoid injury, it's best to adhere to the strict (but unspoken) expectations for minimum speed, passing protocol, merging etiquette, and pit-stops. On evenings of the Holidazzle, however, the skyways transform from freeways into luxury suites for the theater happening on the streets down below. Sure a walking aisle is roped off in the center of each skyway crossing Nicollet Avenue, but against the windows families can be found camping out for hours ahead of time to reserve their prime (and heated) seats for the parade.

The Holidazzle Parade completed its 18th consecutive year with Sunday evening's performance, but even if it just runs for 4 evenings a week between Thanksgiving and Christmas, it's refreshing to see these utilitarian spaces serving the public in delightful ways.

From all of us at Threshold, we hope you've enjoyed reading and we will continue expanding our reach into the new year.

Happy (politically-correct) Holidays!

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

2009-12-18T10:03:00.017-06:00

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.

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

2009-12-15T14:02:00.029-06:00

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.

Suburban Archaeology #7: The Design of Christmas

2009-12-10T22:36:00.002-06:00

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.

Model Reality | Tom Westbrook

2009-12-08T09:01:00.007-06:00

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.

High-end Natural

2009-12-03T09:30:00.005-06:00

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?

In Plain Sight | American For Life

2009-11-30T06:00:00.004-06:00

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.)

A Start?

2009-11-25T08:48:00.004-06:00

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.

Exploded View | Matt Olson "Dan Graham: Beyond"

2009-11-19T17:12:00.010-06:00

Photo: Annick Herbert/Herbert Collection

When asked recently who his least favorite person in the world is, the artist Dan Graham responded "It's a tie between George W. Bush and Rem Koolhaas." I can't say for sure what this means but, after seeing the fantastic and exhausting retrospective "Dan Graham: Beyond" currently up at the Walker Art Center, it somehow seems like the perfect answer. The same playful, contrarian, punk rock-ish, smart alec tone and spirit is present almost everywhere in the exhibit.

Photo: Dan Graham

Dan Graham isn't a household name but probably should be. Former Walker Art Center curator Philippe Vergne, now the Director of the Dia Art Foundation describes Graham's work as "elitism for everyone." He's often described as an artists artist. Artforum magazine recently wrote about what an admired figure he is amongst young practitioners, and it's easy to see why after taking in the show. Even as he's aged, he's stayed actively involved in the youth based underground DIY scene and punk rock art culture. Maybe it's some youthful restlessness that helped him be at the forefront of just about every art movement that's happened since Minimalism. He really sets a good example as he wanders from exploration to exploration.

Photo: Anabela Rosas Trindade/Fundação Serralves

If you've ever been to the Walker Art Center's Sculpture Garden you'll no doubt remember Graham's Two Way Mirror Punched Steel Hedge Labyrinth (1994). It seems like whenever I'm there, children are busy getting lost in their ghost-like reflections, laughing and learning about perception in a way that's truly joyful to watch. The piece in the Garden is typical of his so called "Pavilions", of which there are many in the exhibit. They are architectural sculptural installations that at first glance call to mind the stripped down "object for object's sake" stance of Minimalism. Graham's statement that all his work is a critique of Minimal art starts to make sense when the viewer approaches one and the sculpture is suddenly filled with motion. Made of mirrors, chrome and steel, they can be as stunningly beautiful as they are disorienting. They're like visual echo chambers that put the viewer in several different places at once, sometimes eliminating the possibility of any sense of self in space.

The retrospective "Dan Graham: Beyond" spans forty some years and includes early experiments with language and the page as a space, his work with video / film, performance based work, conceptual art, and even a charming piece where he simply shows slides of work by artists and architects who have influenced and inspired him. I'm surprised I'm using the word charming here but I think you'll see what I mean. It's a good thing there's a little charm, too, as Graham's work can, on a certain level, be intimidatingly complex, narrow and intense.

So as I found myself being drawn into heavy philosophical questions about perception and analysis, I kept thinking about kids and how they react to these pieces. Children don't think about these things, they experience these things, they participate, they experiment... and I encourage you to do the same thing.

I can not recommend this show strongly enough.

Dan Graham: Beyond
October 31, 2009 - January 24th 2010
Walker Art Center

Mod Minn(ies): Mod for the Masses

2009-11-17T23:30:00.012-06:00

In these difficult economic times companies are finding inventive ways to offer modern design. The mortgage crisis temporarily broke the spirit of residential building, but architects are exploring digital methods to bring modernism to the everyday person. Hometta, a new web-based company, is repackaging the process of building a designer home by offering 24 small, sustainable home options designed by award-winning architects and an on-line support network to get them built for homeowners on a budget.

Hometta is one of several companies on the web focused on purveying modern house plans. Instead of typical custom homes designed around customers’ specific needs and site conditions these plans are sold as products. By purchasing Hometta’s monthly membership users are able to thumb through plans, utilize an online construction guide and locate modern builders in their area. Hometta takes the basic plan sales one step further to help digitally guide clients though their construction process for a reasonable cost of only few thousand dollars. Hometta’s is also unique because it specializes in modern homes under 2,500 square feet with sustainable features

One of Minneapolis’ own, U of M Architecture professor Marc Swackhamer, is offering his ”Draft House” as one of the Hometta house plans. Swackhamer’s firm Houminn joined Hometta early as minority owners in the company. Hometta provides the firm the ability to further develop their initial concept originally developed for the HOME housing exhibit at the Weismen Art Museum.

Houminn’s home is constructed with typical construction methods but is tuned in to its surroundings. This two level home harnesses natural ventilation from openings in the second level floor and a series of flip-up dormers on the roof. The public spaces are located on the main level which is partially bermed into the ground to provide natural insulation from Northern winter winds. The house requires careful site placement to maximize solar exposure with large Southern windows. This floor to ceiling glass creates a seamlessness from exterior patio to living room making this small home feel large.

HouMinn from Hometta, Inc. on Vimeo.

Hometta's website and designs are alluring, but the question remains: are these unique homes within the grasp of the everyday person? The promise of affordable modern architecture has become the architectural holy grail of the 21st Century. Prefab promises of the past ten years made similar claims but never fulfilled their goals beyond the typical high-end market. However, with difficult economic times the web offers new and exciting ideas for better delivery of design for the mass market, making Hometta’s concept a promising innovation. Will it succeed in bringing affordable modern homes to those that haven’t typically been able to tap into architectural design, or will it just take clients from already struggling firms?

Suburban Archaeology #6: The Buzzing Culdesac, A Secure Harbor

2009-11-12T23:06:00.006-06:00

Often viewed as the tentacles of the evil beast named Suburban Sprawl, the culdesac gets a bad rap, and in some ways perhaps it's justified. After all, aren't gridded neighborhoods better than sprawling modern developments? New Urbanism evangelists seem to think so. In many ways they are right, but playing devil's advocate, I am here to defend my old pal Culdesac just a little bit.

I grew up on a culdesac as a youngster (with fond memories) and ironically now live on one again as an adult in perhaps the most unlogistic mecca to sprawl on earth: Eden Prairie, MN. Ask any civil engineer, town planner or subdivision developer and there arise clinical definitions of what a culdesac is and vehement hatred for them by the aforementioned philosophers for anti-suburbanism and I'll leave all that to them. But take a closer look, spend some time here - days and weeks even - and come to discover what makes them a lot more colorful than some clinical definition and certainly not as evil, or even as useless, as the naysayers suggest. Or maybe there's just something extraordinarily magic about ours.

What makes the difference is how it is used by the people who live on it. I crafted the illustration"The Buzzing Cul-de-Sac", following my family's first Summer in the new neighborhood to try and convey a not-that-exaggerated depiction of what happens here. Oddly, that drawing hangs proudly in our powder room years later and still does an amazing job of conveying what is good and right about the asphalt circle that fronts the homes of my neighbors and friends. Less of a vehicular turnaround and more of a public plaza, our culdesac has played host to bazaar-like multi-family cookouts and potlucks, 4th of July micro-festivals and even makeshift drive-in movies. Our children run and play here while the adults come out and greet each other with a cup of coffee in the morning or a beer in the afternoon. Lawnchairs are locked into position and stories of the week are related. I don't know about other people and how they use their culdesacs, but I know a good thing when I see it and I wouldn't trade mine for a leprechaun's pot of gold.

I still scratch my head in bewilderment some days when driving around this muddled ball of confusion they call The EP, with stop-and-start residential streets, most terminating in nowhere, many of which bearing the same name; and snaking avenues that offer no intelligently conceived or direct linkage to my destination. It makes me wonder some days why I chose this place and moreover why I choose to stay. There are several, more complicated answers to that question but one of the most deceptively simple is a love for my kids, my neighbors, my culdesac. I have only to arrive at my driveway and it feels really good; seeing kids riding bikes, skateboards and pedal cars around and around like crazy, happy little people in some juvenile whirling dervish. All the while in a safe, snug harbor that no gridded street system could pull off in a million years. I smile, re-emerge moments later, shirt untucked and beer in hand, and am perfectly right with the world.

Descending to the Challenge

2009-11-11T08:39:00.004-06:00

looking down from the highest deck level at the Albertsson/Hansen House

It has always seemed to me that little residential city lots should exhibit better interface between land and building. After all, the houses are small, so families need to get outdoors to have more space. And there are other houses all around, which makes the typical 50x150 lot more like an urban plaza than a green yard. And yet, the norm runs more toward gumball spirea, overgrown arborvitae, and a hastily-laid paver patio where the picnic table never quite sits evenly.

Christine Albertsson and Todd Hansen (of Albertsson Hansen Architecture) have an even tougher site: it’s high above Minnehaha Creek and the area behind the house drops precipitously into a floodplain thicket. The only useable space at all was the half-a-postage-stamp front yard.

When they added on to their little saltbox house, they built a bright red tower that sits low on the slope and extends up three stories behind and to the side of the original house. Though the interface between the two on the inside is a small bit of architectural mastery, what was done with the outdoor spaces is creative and elegant.

looking up from a lower level at the main middle level and the new screened porch

The rear side of the two-part house creates a little intimate niche into which the pair has built a vertically stacked series of decks. Descending them from the main house level brings different experiences of the forest, different unique spaces, and, perhaps most notably, different entrances into the house. At the lowest level, the deck system gives access to the “basement” of the new red tower, which is a guest/media room tucked into the slope. Throughout, the details are simple (wood and steel wire rails), and that allows the multi-textured house and the forest to become the real show.

wood and steel detailing at the lowest deck level

This house and landscape together offer up a variety of outdoor, indoor, and combination spaces not often achieved on small city lots. Though Christine and Todd’s site is unusual (and pretty stunning), using the house (whether existing or new) as a spatial divider is an under-used tool by both architects and landscape architects. This is such an improvement over a few concrete steps out the back door.

looking up at the complex outdoor space tucked into a niche between the new parts of the house (red) and the original structure (white)

Automated Means and Methods

2009-11-05T14:28:00.002-06:00

In the first decade of the twentieth century Henry Ford implemented a developing technology (the assembly line) to construct his Model T in a more efficient and cost effective manner. This newly perfected method of production made the Model T more readily available to a broader consumer base and made the Ford Motor Company an American industrial stalwart. The development of the assembly line was soon adopted by countless industries and lead to America’s prosperity in the twentieth century. In 1961, a mere 50 years after Ford implemented the assembly line, the first robot replaced a human in the manufacturing process. The Unimate was used by GM to transport die castings and weld them to car bodies.

History tells us, then, that it is only a matter of time until a robot replaces a human on the construction site as well. That time may have been marked by the development and implementation of R-O-B at the 2008 architectural biennial in Venice. R-O-B is a fabrication robot developed by the Swiss architecture firm of Gramazin & Kohler in conjunction with the ETH Zurich Faculty of Architecture. It uses a robotic arm to translate a digital model (designed by Gramazin & Kohler) into a full scale in situ fabrication. R-O-B’s latest creation is Pike Loop, which is located on a traffic island on Pike Street in Manhattan. Pike Loop is an infinite ribbon of brick that winds in and out of itself and around obstructions such as light posts and benches. In this it mimics and plays off the traffic congestion that whirls around the island on which it sits. As you move around Pike Loop the varying density of the brick pattern opens and closes fragmented views of the city. Pike Loop pixelizes the city and creates moments that are dependent on the speed at which you walk along it. It is a poignant commentary on the mechanization of cities. Sometimes we benefit from this mechanization, other times we are rendered obsolete by it, yet we control it.

Click here to view R-O-B in action.

Exploded View | Matt Olson: "Momentary Performances and Things That Last Longer"

2009-11-02T14:28:00.019-06:00

Lee Walton's Momentary Performances will take place around the Twin Cities from Sept-Nov. Each performance is a simple action that in everyday life would normally be overlooked. By giving this action or performance a time, date and location, Walton's intention is to highlight the subtleties and beauties of everyday people and actions. - from the show's program

A couple months back after spending the afternoon at the Walker Art Center in "The Quick and the Dead" exhibit, my friend David Hamlow and I stood stunned in the underground parking garage talking about how overwhelming the show was. One of the museum guards told us about an unlisted work in the show by the artist Trisha Donnelly, a car parked in the garage with California plates that read 666. We found it and we loved it. Just as we were about to leave we noticed a series of large pipes running along the wall that reached a point where they were all disconnected, so that any fluid running through them would've just spilled out on the ground. It almost looked like art; needing only a conceptual context to frame it with. We talked about how, with the right mindset, anything can be art, an idea that is always exciting to think about.

Lee Walton's work often explores this concept. He's currently got a solo show up here in Minneapolis at the Olson Gallery called "Momentary Performances and Things That Last Longer". If you are able to attend, it is a highly recommended show.

Walton's work playfully explores how relatively minor changes to things, like relocating things, slightly altering spaces, reenacting mundane things can become thought provoking and occasionally profoundly beautiful.

Having read about Walton's work a lot in the last few years, I've been interested in the word "experientialism" which is almost always used to describe it. Lately I've seen it used to describe other artists work as well. So I asked Lee about it and he was nice enough to answer...

Me: Could you talk a bit about what "experientialism" is and what it means to you? Is it actually a movement? Did you coin this term?

Lee Walton: This is a tough question really. I did coin the term back in 2001. It was more a negation of other terms, rather, than anything else. I've been labeled a performance artist, a conceptual artist, or (the newest one) social practice artist. All are good and it's all connected. But I felt if I latched on to one of these and accepted it fully, I'd be filling a role of some kind. I am more interested in an open-ended situation - such as being an Eperientialist - whatever that is. Also, as a young artist, trying to coin a movement was the LAST thing you were supposed to do. So it seemed appropriate to do it right away.

There is a thrill when I see the word used to describe my work or others. Especially whe its an art paper or public press. It's like "sneaking" something into the vernacular and just seeing if it floats.

Experentialism... hmmm... Experiential Practice? I still like it!

As a creative professional, I'm always trying to broaden my view of where life, art and work intersect. It always makes all three things better. Walton's work is a great place to start thinking about these things and I can't recommend looking into his work enough. And if you live in the Twin Cities, don't miss this show.

Lee Walton "Momentary Performances and Things that Last Longer"
Bethel University - Olson Gallery
Sept 18 - Dec 13, 2009

The last opportunity to experience a "Momentary Performance" is coming up on Nov 5th. Details here.

Making | Tom Westbrook

2009-10-30T12:25:00.003-05:00

As my career has evolved through artist, designer, teacher and builder I have had the chance to collaborate with many disciplines. The commonality and the part I enjoy the most is working and spending time with people who make things, things ranging in scale and significance from photographs and paintings to buildings and cities. Artists, architects, designers of all stripes, craftspeople, builders, performers, all are involved in the act of manipulating the material world with some sort of intent. My column, Making, is about my experiences with building and craft and to report on the toils of others as they shape our world.

As of late, I have been up on Lake Superior’s North Shore, a veritable hotbed of people who make things. I too have been making things up here, lately a simple timber framed porch. I learned the skills of timber framing a few years ago when I had the incredible experience of carving a timber frame cabin with my father, step-mother and nephew at the North House Folk School in Grand Marais. North House is a nexus of people who make things, focusing on folk craft and skills, ranging from timber and log building to boat building and beer making. They have an ever-changing campus of old and new brightly colored buildings that is littered with projects of many scales in various stages of completion. When visiting one can find group built timber frames ready to be auctioned, black smiths at their forges, circles of people surrounded by flakes of stone in a flint knapping class. A wood fired bread oven puts forth pizzas for the communal party on Saturday nights; translucent, newly built kayaks set out in the harbor at twilight, carrying flashlights that make them glow like Chinese lanterns. Whether or not one takes classes there (which I cannot recommend strongly enough) just stopping by, watching the activity and asking the invariably friendly instructors, staff and participants what they are doing, each visit is an education. For designers, so often immersed in a digital world, a foray into a place full of sawdust, fire, stone, and often sweat is not only a respite, but an inspiration. North House’s new catalogue is just out and can be found on line at http://www.northhouse.org. Next time a look at the physical world at a much smaller scale.

In Plain Sight | Mill Ruins Park

2009-10-26T19:59:00.005-05:00

Near St. Anthony Falls, there is no shortage of vistas looking down into the river valley: Water Power Park, Gold Medal Park, the Guthrie, and Mill City Museum, just to name a few. While spectacular in their own ways, these designs nonetheless seem to compete with one another to be the newest, highest, or cantilevered-est (do your worst, spell check!) place to look down at the Mississippi. However, a less common but perhaps more significant view is only found at the waters edge--at the basement level of the mills which were built here.

Opened in 2001 (and expanded in years since), Mill Ruins Park offers a subterranean peek at how Minneapolis industry harnessed—and was nearly drowned by—the force of St. Anthony Falls. While this natural feature catapulted our city to milling fame, so pervasive was the industry's network of gates, canals, waterwheels, and more than 12 miles of tunnels that it weakened the layer of limestone that had made everything possible in the first place. The catastrophic collapse of the Eastman Tunnel, 140 years ago this month, nearly disintegrated the falls and the entire milling industry with it.

While a system of aprons, locks, and dams begun by the Army Corps of Engineers in 1869 preserved the falls, the old milling infrastructure wasn't so lucky. New hydroelectric dams eliminated the need for direct water power and allowed that industry to be buried by a new one: gravel storage. Thanks to archaeological excavations by the Minnesota Historical Society, we can now see glimpses of our how our city survived unyielding nature, changing commerce, and itself.

Strip-Mining the Suburban Archaeology #5: The Royal Order of the Lampshade Caribou

2009-10-21T21:49:00.005-05:00

For many years I have held a strange fascination with lodges. You know: The Masons, The Knights of Columbus, The Elks Club. There's more, but you know who they are. My Dad was a Knight and my Uncle still is a Mason. They never shared many details and that fueled the mystique and charm for me. My fascination has run so deep that I even invented my own lodge: The Royal Order of the Lampshade Caribou. This isn't a real lodge organization, but one I invented for my twisted illustration purposes and do enjoy revisiting time and again. The irony and comic value in the name are obvious but also evokes married man-folk indulging in manly vice, free from the scrutiny of their women, long what I've supposed goes on within the hallowed halls of men's lodges across this fine nation of ours. A little reprieve sans judgment or bar tabs at the end of a long, hard week of bringing home the bacon and maybe even saving the world? I dunno...the romantic in me likes it better than the clichés of secret, mystic rites and cloaked cult ceremonies. In my world, cocktails, cigars, poker and darts...these were the items on the agenda at any given monthly meeting. Or so I thought. And who knows, the truth may still remain somewhere between the two.

However, while chatting about the old days with my next door neighbor, 80 year-old World War II vet Mr. Nelson (who my wife lovingly refers to as Mr. Wilson...my son and he have a cool relationship...hope you get the reference.) he let slip that he was a Mason. And not just a Mason, but a Shriner and former Grand Potentate as well. Needless to say his stature with me grew 100 more points right there! As we discussed my oversimplified interpretation of lodges and their secret inner workings (and my Lampshade Caribou illustration work), I began to realize some significant additional coolness to the Lodgely-legends I had built up over time in my mind. While he made no contradictions (or apologies) regarding the presence of suds, smoke and poker filling his or any other lodge, he was quick to point out that the hard work and world-saving valiance of these men didn't end with the day job. These guys give to the community and the world like nobody's business.

My column would've ended right there, but my wife reading over my shoulder (god love her) thought me sexist for not giving a nod to newer crops of women's organizations like her Women of Today. What? You guys don't just ogle male strippers and drink sangria on those once-a-month outings? I guess I was wrong about them too. (I'm hoping the world can hear my tongue nearly scraping the skin from my cheek, right?) Groups like WOT also bundle well-deserved social camaraderie with selfless, tireless community activism and inspiring beneficence.
These organizations have played pivotal, earnest, often overlooked and certainly misunderstood roles within their communities for generations; spanning back in some cases well over a century or more. The Shriners for instance - through their hospitals and circuses - have made no less than Herculean leaps in providing free medical care to children in their communities to the amount of millions of dollars a year in fact. I tip my hat, or rather the fez, to you gentlemen (and good ladies). Aye. I'll drink to that.

Mod Minn(ies): Log Cabin Lineage

2009-10-19T09:23:00.008-05:00

Sometimes great work comes from exploring simple materials. Perhaps no structure expresses this more than the iconic log cabin, a genuine product of simple and rustic materials put together in efficient and practical ways. The Minneapolis architecture firm of CityDeskStudio recently designed an update to the traditional log home with a modern play on materials, reinterpreting the log pattern as a graphic texture, while still maintaining its original rustic spirit.

This modern cabin completes an extended family ensemble of log cabins that first began decades ago, each perched upon a forested slope overlooking a small lake in Northern Wisconsin. This logged landscape serves as an evolutionary chart, featuring four different cabins ranging from whole-tree chinked boxes to framed structures with applied log siding. When asked to add a new cabin to the set, CityDesk decided to reinvent the log motif as a series of quilted textures and patterns applied to a simple structure, rather than draw directly from the lineage of ancestral cabins.

Walking down hill from the original structures towards the new 2500 square foot cabin, one first sees a large earthen berm. Only after getting closer do you realize the landscape is concealing a one-story shed building covered in a sedum green roof. The front walk is the gap between the berm and richly textured log appliqué of the wall. Initially CityDesk had hoped to create earthen walls from the same log texture, but the effect is not lost with the readily available rusty black granite walls. The stone closely relating to the color of the thick Corten fascia and trim that frame the alternating log panels. Each series of log panels serve as a rain-screen and their varying scale is visually divided by a rhythmic steel batten. The rustic façade gives way to a large expanse of smooth commercial glass which wraps the entire corner of the home to draw focus towards the lake.

The interior structure is also set up to focus on this corner view. The main level is a large open living space for two families with two separate master suites (the kids reign on the walkout level). The living space is framed with exposed reclaimed 2x16 timber joists oriented diagonally. They are spaced in a gradient pattern staggered from 2’ on center and get increasingly closer together as they get near the outside wall. This captures the eye and puts focus on the corner which is dissolved with the floor-to-ceiling glass, strongly linking the interior to the outside views.

The interior finishes are again simple, rustic and repetitive, but inventive. A carpet of grouted pebbles leads you into the cabin from the outside. The stones grow in scale with the masonry fireplace and stairway railing, but maintain a similar texture. The rustic masonry is punctuated with industrial steel circles that literally dot the interior as yet another unifying material to the Corten on the exterior. Dark wood floors, cabinets and trim create continuity with the log exterior. However on the inside the log siding is only experienced as an abstract pattern obscured by frosted glass, creating a visually interesting play of mass and void.

This family collection of log cabins through the ages is a unique opportunity to explore regional architecture and its evolution. By exploring how simple, natural materials can become adapted into modernist architecture, CityDeskStudio has again found a way to reinterpret simple vernacular architecture and make it surprisingly new. It’s a lesson that good architecture can come from tradition and still be inventive and fun.

Greenspace Conduit

2009-10-16T09:43:00.006-05:00

In the 1930’s the High Line in New York City allowed freight trains to traverse the west side of the island above the street and out of the way of automobile and pedestrian traffic. This was a welcomed urban renewal project in that freight train and street traffic accidents had become so prevalent on the west side of the city that New Yorkers dubbed 10th Avenue Death Avenue (the city’s first attempt at remedying the situation was to put a man on a horse and have this man ride in front of each train waving a red flag). The High Line was in operation from 1934 to 1980. After the last train was removed from the tracks, the High Line sat unused for 29 years.

On June 9th, 2009, the High Line was reincarnated brilliantly, in the form of a public park that stretches from Gansevoort Street to 20th Street. The High Line in its park form was conceived by landscape architect James Corner’s Field Operations and architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro. Entering the park from the Gansevoort Street end one walks up a long stairway that slices between massive steel girders. At the top of the stair waits a harmonious melding of industry and nature. The precast concrete paving strips narrow as they move away from you allowing vegetation to grow between them. This design move creates the feeling that the hardscape is receding away from you and that nature is advancing toward you. Some of the paving strips emerge from the ground plane and transform into Ipe seating areas. To mark the transition between hardscape and planted areas, the edge of the paving strip is lifted or bulges slightly. The change in elevation is only an inch or so, but as you walk your foot perceives this change and you are kept from wandering into the planted area. No railing is needed.

It is fitting, I suppose, that the High Line is more about moving you through than it is about holding you in place. There are a few moments, however, where the path widens and opens up into a place to gather. The most successful of these is the amphitheater-like space that hangs over the intersection of 10th Avenue and 14th Street. While seated in this space you are oriented down toward the intersection which is visible through huge sheets of glass that have been placed between the existing steel structural members. Through the glass, cars appear seemingly out of nowhere from underneath you and speed away. The steel lattice work, above the glass, screens the cars from view after they pass so they seem to disappear just as suddenly as they had appeared. It’s a fascinating perspective of urban traffic that displays how rapidly cars actually move within the city.

In its creation of successful places and implementation of clever design gestures the High Line proves that urban preservation and urban renewal are not mutually exclusive ideas. It is possible to save pieces of the city and still create new ones. Entire blocks do not need to be razed and rebuilt in the name of progress. Old structures do not need to be saved just because they are old. Cities evolve in a meaningful way when designers and city officials take the time and put in the effort to carefully select which urban elements to purge, which to keep, and which to transform.

The Tropics in Winter

2009-10-12T13:34:00.005-05:00

Fall is fickle. I’d love to get outside and enjoy the crisp air and changing colors and bring you a work of L.Architecture with which to enjoy the usually excellent October weather. But now we have snow! So I’m going indoors.

courtesy Saint Paul Parks and Recreation

The Como Park Conservatory (formally called the Marjorie McNeely Conservatory since its major renovation in 2002) was built in 1915. It is a stylistic descendant of the famed Garfield Park Conservatory (built 7 years earlier) in Chicago, which was designed by landscape architect Jens Jensen. Jensen’s glass-barn architecture and exquisite Fern Room changed the thinking behind these indoor plant display places forever. Conservatories transformed immediately from showcases of specimen plants, each in its own pot, to true gardens, overflowing with plants like an actual jungle.

The Fern Room at Chicago's Garfield Park Conservatory

But while Garfield still has a few rooms devoted to the specimen-driven style, Como is all environment. The Palm Dome, just behind the main entrance, has myriad coconut and date palms festooned with bomeliads and air plants. The North Garden is centered on a still central pool. The Sunken Garden is a formal space with changing seasonal displays that is popular for weddings (in fact, I got married there almost exactly seven years ago – maybe another reason I have conservatories on the brain right now).

from the Como Zoo and Conservatory website: the Sunken Garden decked out for fall

The 2005 addition of the Como Zoo Visitor Center, which is connected to the Conservatory, allowed for the addition of an updated, fully-accessible Fern Room (though I still think the old one was better in its encrusted canyon-like way) and permanent bonsai and orchid collections. The Visitor Center also has Tropical Encounters, which brings animals from the zoo together with plants from the Conservatory.

What’s great about the Conservatory is it’s all glass. So when you’re standing amongst the palms and enjoying the humidity, you can still see the rain (or snow or sleet) outside. It’s a little mind-bending and very satisfying.

Matt Olson | Bellicose Biotope

2009-10-07T21:44:00.011-05:00

There are so many possible points of departure when you encounter work by the artist Liz Miller. Her large, site specific installations can call to mind the raw and pure creativity present in young children. There's a free, wildly imaginative spirit that results from the brightly colored abstract shapes that connect and wander. Yet there’s an obvious order present as well that seems exacting, very particular and serious. Her work explores the chaos and order of both natural and man-made systems and, whether or not you're interested in reflecting on the conceptual basis and inspiration behind it, it is all absolutely beautiful.

Her piece, “Bellicose Biotope” currently on display in Cargill Hall at the Central Library in downtown Minneapolis is a must see. The library, with all its systems and organized information, is such a perfect place to encounter her work and ponder its possible meanings.

Having seen her work on many occasions and in many different environments, I'm always filled with thoughts and questions about it. Liz was kind enough to do a short interview with me about the piece at the library and her work in general.

Matt Olson: Generally, when I look at your work I don't really notice the space it's in... but it occurs to me what a huge role that plays in the work. Could you talk a bit about how you approach the architecture or built environment you are installing in? How much and in what ways does it affect your creative process?

Liz Miller: My work is dependent on architecture as an armature and a backdrop. The space potentially limits the work, but, more importantly, it provides possibilities. I have always been interested in the potential for my work to infest an otherwise benign space, or to travel in paths through the space that deviate from our expectations.

Architecture and site do play a large role in my planning process. Because I need to build the work mostly in my studio as opposed to on-site, I work from floor plans, photographs, and, when possible, I do site visits. I have found that no diagram or image can recreate the feeling of actually being in a space. When in a space, I am able to observe people’s movement through the space, and to respond to that in my work by attempting to guide their path, to force them to interact with the space in a new way.

An exhibition venue’s architecture always brings new challenges or creates new potential. For example, my work in the Central Library responded to the gallery’s glass façade by “breaking through” that façade and into the public library space. This was something that I had not originally considered, but it became an important part of the work once I spent time in the library. Unique architectural features are often echoed by dramatic or subtle changes in the work’s path or behavior. Here the work becomes more chaotic and less ordered once it extends into the library space.

MO: Since your work is based in exploring systems, do you ever consider the systems present within the buildings your work is going into? Or the mechanics of systems that might be behind the walls you're working with?

LM: Well, it might be stretching to say that I consider what’s going on in terms of mechanical systems within a given architecture. However, I do give consideration to the type of activity that a building contains and its established function or use, particularly when that building is not a gallery or museum. In many instances, I focus on establishing a relationship that is at once symbiotic and contrasting in relation to what I imagine to be the existing systems or behaviors. In Bellicose Biotope, the portion situated in the gallery responds to the order of the library—the two hanging rows have a space between that is similar to the space you would find between aisles of books. The order dissolves, however, giving way to behavior that perhaps challenges the initial logic, and the seeming order of a space in which information is highly structured.

MO: How has your work exploring systems changed or affected the way you see the world? Has it affected how you perceive design and architecture? Personally, I find myself in a constant state of discernment about the aesthetic quality of my surroundings... always thinking about what I'd do different. I wonder if you also do this. And on a related note, are there any famous spaces that you'd love to work in?

LM: My work with systems has caused me to look at things from both a micro and macro perspective. Within any larger system, there are multiple small systems, sub-systems that are at work. Slight deviations in any part of their behavior can lead to tumult, even disaster, for the entire system. So, not to sound paranoid, but I think my research into this has made me realize that so much of systemic behavior, and so much of life, is both beautifully synchronized and terribly precarious. I try to capture this tension.

My involvement with my own work has definitely impacted how I view design and architecture. For one, it has made me interested in the places where art, design, and architecture intersect. I guess I have always seen my work as being more in a dialogue about life as opposed to a dialogue about other art. While I am deeply interested in contemporary art, it is exciting for me to think about my work as being part of a broader conversation, one than can extend beyond the confines of the art world. In this way, I feel a kinship with design and architecture. By their nature, these disciplines have to extend beyond themselves to include consideration for their larger role in the world.

I don’t know that I can pinpoint one famous space that I’d like to work in, but I am always interested in situating my work in spaces that provide new opportunities. For some reason, I like to envision my work functioning in a space with intense architectural ornament, almost a Baroque sort of backdrop. I wonder how I could integrate elements of this type of ornament into the work, and also how my work could contrast the architecture. I’m also interested in situations with challenging scale or natural lighting situations.

The Precious Object is free to the public and on display from 09/18/09 to 01/03/10 in Cargill Hall on the second floor at the Central Library in downtown Minneapolis. The show also features the work of 13 other artists from the state of Minnesota.

Strip-Mining the Suburban Archaeology #4: "Sam the Butcher"

2009-10-06T21:47:00.007-05:00

The illustration “Sam the Butcher” was inspired by both my recollections of everyone's favorite beefhacker from The Brady Bunch and a recent “discovery” of the Linden Hills area of Minneapolis. While doing some sales calls for my line of greeting cards in Linden Hills, I came across a quaint and cool butcher shop called “Clancey's Meat & Fish.” Shortly after, I discovered a shop across the street that sold baked goods. ONLY baked goods. And then a toy store. After a couple more similar finds did I start to feel I had time-warped back to some kind of Twilight Zone of non-chain stores that each specialized in just one thing. And I was WALKING from one to the other. There were pleasant smiles and kind hellos. It was crazy to me and I was jealous. See, I don’t have these kinds of places where I live.

We all know (unless you are five years old and/or have been existing under the ocean for your whole life) that the independently-owned “Mom & Pop” specialty store has been dealt the fate of the dodo bird by the likes of the “Big-Box Stores”. Depending on whom you talk to and where you talk to them, this could be viewed as either a good thing or a bad thing.

While Mom & Pops, walkable communities, and co-op grocery markets still exist by-and-large in Middle-Suburbia (my term for the aged, gridded-street, early-to-mid-century suburbs located on the edges of most urban centers); they have been entirely eradicated from or left out completely in the planning of contemporary development. While the idea of the shopping mall and subsequently the big-box store was to provide the masses with efficient, one-stop-shopping models in step with the perceived convenience of the automobile, the resultant loss of the single-owner store has greatly left its mark on the overall fabric of communities.

I’m not sure most people see places like Linden Hills or the Bryn Mawr neighborhood as suburbs anymore. That's because the moniker has been associated these days mostly with places like Eden Prairie (where I live) or Maple Grove and the differences between these sorts of towns are as vast and wide as Sam the Butcher's quaint little shop and the Big Box Meat Zone.

In Plain Sight | Potholes

2009-10-05T06:00:00.001-05:00

Slowly and quietly, the region's last glaciers melted away some 10,000 years ago. In most instances, they left behind the calm lakes and modest streams with which we are all familiar.

In a last great act of defiance, however, the glacier that created what is now the St. Croix River Valley stomped several dozen goofy footprints (called “potholes”) in the land. As ice receded into jagged outcroppings of the river gorge, glacial runoff often formed whirlpools with such force that they drilled downward though the rock below. Rocks and sediment swirling in these eddies acted like polish, carving smooth formations into the earth.

More than 80 of these funnels can be seen at Interstate State Park near Taylors Falls, the highest concentration anywhere on the planet. Many are partially filled with years of sediment, but the park also boasts the world's largest excavated pothole as well. A few at a time, visitors are welcome to navigate the narrow steps down into the ominously-named “Bottomless Pit” (pictured above). Of course in this case, “bottomless” means only 60 feet, but it’s still a humbling experience to stare up at the powerful forces which carved our home.

Mod Minn(ies): Solar Studies

2009-09-28T09:51:00.013-05:00

This week the University of Minnesota will export a small but innovative modern structure called the Icon Solar House to the National Mall in Washington D.C. to compete in the Department of Energy’s Solar Decathlon. The Icon will join 19 other semifinalists to create a temporary Solar Village. Each resident project is an energy-neutral prototype for sustainable living in its native region. Minnesota’s entry is the result of two years of multiple-disciplinary collaboration by 150 students from five college departments and some of the most innovative technologies produced in the state.

The 800 square foot house owes its namesake to the iconic features familiar to Minnesota’s residential homes. These familiar elements – a steeply gabled roof, a front porch, and simple punched windows – are an effort to make the public realize the potential for solar technology in mainstream housing. Despite the typical forms, the Icon is really a high-tech modern home showcasing features like electrochromic windows that tint with the flick of a switch, R-50 super-insulated walls and structural systems that allow the house to be easily disassembled and shipped. Each component and design feature is weighed against the project’s overall goals to generate renewable energy and reduce energy consumption.

The envelope of the house is a series of exposed structural ribs holding thirty integrated solar panels, both solar thermal panels for creating hot water and hydronic heat, and photovoltaic panels for generating electricity. Even the porch is shaded with a glass roof capable of producing energy by capturing reflected light via embedded silicon panels. This high-tech wrapper forms the ‘iconic’ skewed gabled roof, showing that solar panels can become beautiful through design. The shiny blue-black roof system is contrasted by reddish horizontal slats that cover the rainscreen system, which literally allows the house to breathe, while visually creating a delicate screen-like appearance. The interior boasts incredibly efficient appliances and when possible the team selected recycled materials and products made in Minnesota.

Beginning October 1, the team will have just under a week to reassemble the house, complete with 2,000-square-foot deck, small lawn, and landscaping that reflects its Minnesota roots. Once the house takes its place on the lawn, the competition showcases all 20 homes in the Solar Village for three weeks. The intention is to educate students and the public, to help promote solar technologies, to promote whole building design, and to demonstrate the potential for net-zero energy homes. The featured homes are not only technologically inventive prototypes but beautifully designed spaces. Each is a completely solar-powered, innovative and inspiring example of how modern design will transform our world in the future. Check out how Minnesota’s own Icon Solar House fairs during the 10 contests on the Grand Mall measuring its design, engineering and usability at the UMN's Solar Decathlon website.

Give me your waif-like, your hungry, Your perfectly coifed yearning to wear Gucci

2009-09-23T19:27:00.005-05:00

It is September and that means the art world in New York is dominated by the fashion industry and Fashion Week. Conde Nast and Hearst release epic novels disguised as magazines dedicated to the world of fashion design. A noticeably larger number of tall skinny people roam the streets, and there is throbbing bass constantly emanating from Bryant Park. Also, it feels as if everyone in the city puts on the most cutting-edge item in their closet so as to dress for the occasion. It’s a little bit like Halloween, but the masks and cat ears are replaced with well tailored suits and dresses. Sure Fashion Week is a little pretentious, elitist, and rococo, but its actual downfall is that it turns its back on architecture. The fashion shows incorporate contemporary painting, sculpture, filmmaking, music, and yet the vast majority of the shows take place inside gargantuan, bland, white tents.
My guess is that the complete void in design of the venue is to ensure the building doesn’t distract attendees from the pieces of clothing on display. I refuse to accept this justification. It is the intellectually easy way out. One would think that if a person or group claims to be the purveyors of all things exceptional in the field of fashion design they would also understand -and hold in esteem- exceptional pieces of architectural design.

Ignoring the design of the venue is an incredible missed opportunity to facilitate a design dialogue between the art of fashion and the art of building. Perhaps the organizers of Fashion Week could take cues from entities like the College of Design at the University of Minnesota and strive to integrate all aspects of design (the University has put architecture students and fashion design students in the same college, even if not yet under the same roof). Such integration would give Fashion Week a broader audience and increase its influence on design as a discipline.

Minne-fornia

2009-09-22T09:22:00.008-05:00

photo credit: Paul Crosby, courtesy Coen+Partners

The Speckman House in Saint Paul is named for architect James Speckman, who was a Minnesota proponent of California Modernism. This 1958 house (one of the earliest examples of the style here in the upper Midwest) has an open ground-level floor plan, big floor-to-ceiling windows, and wide roof overhangs. All of that is meant to bring the outdoors in, something that works quite well in California, but is just a tad trickier here in the frozen north.

Nevertheless, when Shane Coen and Stephanie Grotta of Coen+Partners got a hold of the house’s landscape about four years ago, they made it an imperative to showcase the architecture. Add to that an almost obsessive attention to detail (in part fostered by the owner, Punch Pizza founder John Soranno) and you have a good example of L.Architecture.

The site plan basically transforms a steep slope behind the house into a series of terraces: one with a pool, one with space for outdoor dining. The upper terrace is at the same elevation as the interior floor, which creates a strong visual link between indoors and out.

Courtesy Coen+Partners

The outdoor use spaces are wrapped by simple concrete walls and a 105-foot long Cor-Ten steel wall that seems ready to vault out into the air as the back yard slope drops away. The surfaces are custom white concrete pavers, with embedded recycled glass. The plant palette is simple: a few preserved oaks, some masses of barberry, a couple rectilinear groupings of ornamental trees, and plenty of lawn.

photo credit: Paul Crosby, courtesy Coen+Partners

The design works at night and in winter, too. In fact, the firm submitted both night and winter photography to the American Society of Landscape Architects’ national award program, from which the project took home an Honor award in Residential Design. (Coen and Grotta got their award yesterday, at ASLA’s national convention in Chicago.)

Though this project is decidedly high end, there are two basic principles here that anyone can use: open up views to/from the house (the Speckman landscape used to be choked with all manner of shrubs and trees) and make the step from indoors to out as easy as possible (maybe even lose the steps entirely). Soranno seems pretty happy with it, and can’t wait for his molded dining table to arrive from Europe, so he can put it out on that upper terrace. The table, in true Punch style, of course, is bright orange.

Guest Post | Matt Olson

2009-09-21T21:17:00.004-05:00

“Yes, Goodbye” 2007 studio view – Jessica Williams

Love at first sight is such an intoxicating concept and feeling. But with art, music, design and such, I’ve learned, as good as it feels, I can’t really trust it in the big picture. And though once in a while something I immediately fall for does continue to dazzle, it’s the work that I have a measured or occasionally even indifferent reaction to, but then for some reason, keeps making its way up to the surface and into my thoughts that is both most interesting and most likely to have a deep effect on me. Sometimes it feels like my creative unconscious self is sending signals to me from some murky depth. It’s almost as if some things seem to get inside and then begin a life of their own. This piece, “Yes, Goodbye”, by the artist Jessica Williams has been a recent example of this phenomena for me. Here’s her description of this piece:

“Yes, Goodbye" consists of a two-part site specific installation and accompanying zine. The dual title reflects the decision to have the zine available in both English and Swedish because it was given away for free to the general public at the exhibition.

The installation was shown at the Malmö Art Academy's Yearly Exhibition in Malmö, Sweden. The first part was installed in my studio and on the last day of the exhibition the small trees were planted in the back yard of the school, without permission. They were arranged in a way where they were not visible to the passerby, but only from the third and fourth-story windows of the school or if someone physically walked into the space where they were.

The trees were planted the day before I left Malmö. I came back a month later and they were in a mess of tall grass surrounded by perfectly mowed grass, as if the gardener did not know what to do with them. A friend of mine who was traveling checked on them again for me a month and half after that, and they had disappeared.

“Yes, Goodbye” 2007 installation – Jessica Williams

I’ve always believed that creative people have a responsibility to their own work and life to explore new ideas and stay current with the arts in all of their disciplines. This is an extension of my belief that the things we ‘feed’ ourselves become the fuel for concepts and ideas that are born later. I’ve worked to create an internal environment where I leave both the time and mental space to fill myself with art and then act as a sort of detached observer as these things seem to order themselves in some mysterious way inside, emerging later as variations of the original or informing new concepts. I’ve learned to honor and pay attention to this seemingly unknowable process of what I could describe as my creative internal ecosystem.

“Yes, Goodbye” 2007 installation site view - Jessica Williams

“Yes, Goodbye” 2007 free zine – Jessica Williams

So it’s fitting that I can’t yet tell you why “Yes, Goodbye” keeps coming to the surface. Maybe it’s because before it was executed as an installation, the eventual outcome of the work because of its use of plants suggested the probability of growth in a literal and yet open-ended and uncertain sense. Maybe it’s because the spirit of making a free lo-fi zine/pamphlet about the piece seems to suggest its impermanence as an actual thing and thus implies its part in a possibly larger dialogue as an idea rather than an action or object. Or to expand on that… that the photo of the space, after the trees disappeared, is still a relevant part of the piece even though the work only exists now as an idea with photographic documentation of the action.

“Yes, Goodbye” 2007 site after trees are gone – Jessica Williams

The one thing I can tell you for sure about this piece and why it’s becoming important to me is that, when she installed the work she didn't have any idea how it was going to turn out. And in a way, that's a lot like the idea of using art and music and such to enrich your perspective. All you need to do is put in the effort; the outcome is by nature, unpredictable and thus, filled with possibility.

Matt Olson is co-founder of ROLU, rosenlof/lucas, ro/lu, a design studio located in Minneapolis, Minnesota that's focus is on modern residential landscape design and installation. Its practice also extends to exterior design and collaborative architectural projects as well as urban planning work and public art. He also blogs about architecture/art/design culture at ROLU and keeps an almost daily photoblog of the studio’s projects at ro/lu.

Scheduling a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood

2009-09-16T08:33:00.007-05:00

I own a very distinct memory from my childhood where on any given day I could walk out the front door of our house onto our little suburban culdesac and make an almost limitless decision as to which neighboring friend I would play with that day. My choices were as abundant as the houses in my purview. Literally every household around us, even over on the next block, contained a kid to play with within 1 to 2 years of my age. It seemed like all of the other parents were my parent's age as well. It was like some strange phenomenon had happened in which all these twentysomething married couples invaded this quiet pocket and entered into some crazy cultish pact or some university-funded social experiment with the express instruction of knocking off children all at the same time.

While the same seems to hold true for my parents and their parents' generations, sadly this is not the case for the modern kid. My own kids in particular also live on a suburban culdesac in a genuinely suburban neighborhood that is, unfortunately for them, a pretty mixed bag. The surrounding neighbors are mostly retirees and empty-nesters, corporate dynamic duo dynamos and those with the tweens and high-schoolers. As a result, playtime for our kids now demands excruciatingly calculated effort, dayplanning and the kind of precision scheduling that could rival that of CEOs of large companies. Being driven (shuttled) by us parents to playdates, heavily structured sports, Scouts and extra-curricular activities are the contemporary equivalent to my generation's simply walking out the door and transporting ourselves to activities via bicycle.

So what is responsible for this shift? Sprawl and excessive dependence on cars to get us where we're going? The media or other forces making us believe it's not safe to let our kids run off and play on their own? Poor town planning that doesn't allow for newer families of the same ages to congregate together as before? Something else? All of the above? What's your take?

In Plain Sight | Island Station

2009-09-14T06:00:00.001-05:00

If “architectural albatross” were in the dictionary, next to the definition one would certainly find a picture of Island Station and its 200' smokestack. This coal plant was built for the St. Paul Gas and Electric Company in 1921, but it isn't on an island at all--unless you're speaking figuratively about its location in the nowhere between Shepard Road and the Mississippi River.

Designed by Toltz, King, and Day (now TKDA), Island Station never really functioned as a power plant either. Halfway through construction, the coal industry devised a more efficient method for producing electricity, thus making Island Station obsolete before it was even finished. When it was fully decommissioned in 1975, the plant had been resigned to off-peak use, meaning it operated less than 10 weeks out of the year. For the next ten years, this cavernous building would only be a storage facility for NSP.

Several attempts have been made over the years to reuse (or maybe just “use”) the property for residential purposes. In 1985, portions were converted to artist studios and a well-documented crew of scrappy houseboat dwellers dropped anchor on the riverbanks. At the height of the latest building craze, developers launched a major effort to revitalize the plant into upscale condominiums with surrounding townhomes and a private marina. This most recent proposal was designed by RSP Architects, and much of the project (along with interior photos) can still be found at the development's marketing website.

Now for sale once again is a power station that never was, on an island that isn't. So far it has only succeeded as a playground for eager developers, curious urban explorers, and albatross spotters. Can this beautiful relic have a purpose?

Mod Minn(ies): Only The Essentials

2009-09-08T13:21:00.006-05:00

Three things make you a true Minnesotan: an inherent love for all foods on a stick, the ability to endure harsh and terrible winters and escaping to the family cabin every free weekend of the summer. When faced with selecting the perfect parcel of land the Minnesotan usually first looks for lakeshore property, but when confronted with steep land prices Kristen Paulsen, architect and faculty at the University of Minnesota, decided to take the lake cabin one step further and situate her cabin of choice in the middle of Lake Vermillion.

More specifically on Ely Island located near Tower, Minnesota which surprisingly is the cheapest way to get lake property. But building on a small island comes with it’s logistical challenges. How do you build on it? Can you get electricity? Is plumbing possible? Kristen’s answer to these dilemmas was to keep things simple, work with basic Minnesotan materials and simple vernacular forms and throw out anything that wasn’t absolutely necessary. She began the planning by spending a summer with her family camping on the island to get to know the landscape composed of granite bedrock covered in thin soils and forests of wispy pines and poplars. Kristen realized that their cabin should maintain the unique experience of camping. Upon arriving home she sat down with the family and drew out all of the essential items they would need for a summer in the North Woods.

After defining bare essentials for cabin life she decided to break the program into three key elements: sleeping, bathing & eating. Each programmatic necessity was given a piece made up of 14:12 gabled black roof and bleached cedar siding. Kristen’s design chopped a basic Minnesota cabin into three elements that she carefully positioned on a clearing along the hill. She explains the simplicity, “the section is always the same -- you just slice off the amount you want depending on program and site conditions”. By breaking the house apart they avoided removing trees and created a spirit that was radically different from their historic Minneapolis home. Each structure is connected via a deck, each cantilevering from its respective cabin and at times the decks grow to become an outdoor living room, carefully designed to provide beautiful views of the lake, the forest and the sky.

Instead of traditional foundations each little building is bolted to the exposed bedrock with a black steel frame. The interiors are simple and elegant, lined with a similar wood as the exterior. The overall effect is a series of linked structures that dance across the natural hillside, inspiring a Swiss Family Robinson-like playfulness. The entire system is well thought out and beautifully executed; by letting simplicity drive the design Kristen’s family was able to develop their ideal lake cabin from only $150,000.

This miniature complex is truly greater than sum of its parts. Simple repetitive forms, natural materials and careful site planning form a quietly nestled Mod Minn(ie) and a unique and inventive retreat for a family on a budget. Most importantly, it reminds us that sometimes artistic invention is more important than luxury, and that a family of four can live large in less than 700 square feet.

Architecture As Public Servant

2009-09-02T21:45:00.014-05:00

In May Threshold published a four-part series on the community oven built by students and faculty from the College of Design and staff and supporters from Casa De Esperanza. The community oven is a brilliantly simplistic integration of real world construction experience and community service. Students build something with their hands and the community is nourished.

I could not help but think of the community oven while on my recent visit to Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. The problems of reflected light and heat that the concert hall imparts on its neighbors and surrounding environment has been well documented. The undulating forms are clad in stainless steel and create enormous parabolic mirrors that bounce glare and heat onto neighboring buildings as well as the public space that surrounds the concert hall.

Before the stainless steel skin was sanded and dulled in 2005 the surrounding public space experienced temperatures of 140˚ Fahrenheit. I’ll grant you that this is not enough heat to cook food, but it is close. I bet if Gehry had pushed the CATIA. a little harder he could have gotten there, and I’m only half joking.

I am not advocating bouncing heat and glare around downtown Los Angeles, but concentrating it for public purpose could help lessen the perception that the building is by and for the elite.
This is not a perception I am creating for dramatic flair, nor am I bashing the concert hall. I interviewed a passerby during my visit. He lives in Orange County only 40 miles away, and he has never attended a performance at the concert hall. It wasn’t that he did not like classical music or theatre. He simply felt the venue was too foreboding from a financial standpoint. However, tickets for the currently running Spamalot show start at $40. Though it is true not everyone has $40 to spend on an event like this, the price seems reasonable.

Imagine how the passerby’s perception might change if he walked by the building one day and they were cooking food for the less fortunate with heat given by the sun and concentrated by the forms of concert hall. Image the poetry of a piece of architecture feeding people both the nourishment of food and culture.

L.Architecture | Weathering on the Mississippi

2009-08-31T21:51:00.006-05:00

The first few installments of L.Architecture have strayed far from the Cities, so this time we’ll keep it close to home. In Dakota County, hundreds of feet above the Mississippi River, a new building and interpretive landscape sits on land with an 8000-year human history.

The Schaar’s Bluff Gathering Center in Spring Lake Park Reserve was designed by Meyer Scherer & Rockcastle, with Close Landscape Architecture +. It’s a small wooden folly designed to take advantage of an unmatched view of the Mississippi River Valley, which is a mile wide here. The building itself consists of just two main rooms: an entry hall and the gathering room, which has a horizontal bank of windows facing the valley and full height glass facing a forested gully. A grand steel scupper lets rainwater cascade down in front of the large windows.

Outside the building is a series of interpretive and recreational elements, including a concrete map of metro-area waterways, a secluded fire ring in the woods right on the edge of the bluff, Cor-Ten steel panels with information about the site and the river, and a fire-ring plaza backed by the curve of the building itself.

It’s a nice combination of site and building (and according to MS&R's website, chock full of sustainable goodies), but I really see the L.Archtecture here when I project myself forward in time. The wood of the façade is already weathering, and I expect it will mute to a natural grey. Grapevines climb up the exterior metalwork, and will eventually create a green canopy over the fire circle.

The building is already subtle in the landscape, but give it a few years and this chapter of the site’s human history will be seemingly absorbed. The center will offer incredible views out from within, and will become merely a reinterpretation of forest and prairie from beyond.

Guest Post | Matt Olson

2009-08-27T09:12:00.023-05:00

No hay camino / se hace camino al andar (There is no road, the road is made by walking) -- From a poem by Antonio MachadoImage

The Argentinean writer/poet Jorge Louis Borges believed that every moment in your life, whether mundane or dramatic, becomes a part of your autobiographical content, and thus, your creative output and spirit. I remembered his theory recently when a Landscape Architecture grad student stopped by Rolu for a studio visit. He seemed puzzled when, after asking about my favorite landscape architects, I explained that I don’t really have any. I told him I’d rather talk about art and music and architecture and literature... and so it will go for me as a contributor here. It’s my hope to get at the spirit of what Borges meant by exploring and celebrating the things that influence my life and work as a landscape designer.

So it’s perfect timing then that The Walker Art Center is currently showing a piece called Slant/Light/Volume, by Robert Irwin, an artist whose work has profoundly affected my sense of space and how I design. It was commissioned in 1971 to celebrate the opening of the, then new, Edward Larrabee designed building that served as the museum’s home until its expansion in 2005. The, work hasn’t been shown since and I highly recommend you a visit. It is a stunning, gentle, quiet installation that almost forces you to be meditative and it's a perfect example of what makes Robert Irwin one of my favorite artists.

Throughout the fifties and into the sixties Robert Irwin was an abstract expressionist painter. While he himself doesn’t look back fondly on the work he was making during his early years, he was an artist of note and was affiliated with the eminent Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles which was a representative of the west coast’s art avant-garde (they gave Andy Warhol his first solo show; paintings were $100.) During the sixties, Irwin started growing more and more restless as a painter and it was around this time that he, in his own words, first “painted something that went beyond the edges of the canvas.” He “looked out into the world and saw that there were no frames around things”. A transformation began with his work and he became one of the founding members of the West Coast Light and Space Movement. He wanted to take the ‘object’ out of art and he began exploring how he might create a ‘set of conditions’ or an environment that could become art.

Once he was free of the canvas, he never looked back. He started manipulating light, shadow and space in large installations with ephemeral materials like theater scrim and other fabric. He challenged how we’re used to seeing and perceiving things. Slant/Light/Volume at the Walker is a perfect example of this and it’s great thinking back over his career with this piece in mind. He has continued to explore the connections between the sentient and the intellectual through perception bending installations as well as work in architecture and landscape design at Dia: Beacon and also the Getty in Los Angeles.

I could go on about Slant/Light/Volume and other elements of Irwin’s work but, it’s not just his art that excites me. It’s his spirit. I’ve come to think of him as a teacher, an aesthetic philosopher, even as a mentor. While I love his art, it’s his sense of the journey, his constant reinvention, his insatiably curious tone and spirit, along with his positive nature that make him such a frequent presence in my thoughts. It's the way the scope of his work seems to widen and at the very same time it becomes more focused. Ultimately, his work seems to have influenced his life as much as his life has influenced his work.

What I love most about my chosen career is that I know both my life and work will be best served if I stay a perpetual student. I look to people like Irwin for inspiration as they continue to challenge themselves and thus us, on how to think about and see the world. If you find yourself at the Walker's Slant/Light/Volume, I encourage you to bask not only in the light and ethereal beauty the work creates but also in the ideas and spirit that led Robert Irwin to make it. Doing so might help you use art for what I think its grandest purpose can be, improving your life.

Finally, upon thinking about Irwin as more than just an artist, as a man who's traveling a road of reduction I propose adding the following words to the title of this post, then using them as a tool to shape each day: “There is no road, the road is made by walking... and walking backwards sometimes take you forward.”

Guest Post | Doug Pierce

2009-08-25T06:00:00.001-05:00

It’s great to see Architecture Minnesota covering the frequently raucous dialogue surrounding LEED. Everybody seems to enjoy bashing it, although few have any better ideas to offer around how to facilitate change at the same scale. No one likes change, so every discipline, expert or industry LEED touches (and there are many) tends to give it jolt and slap from their individual perspective. It’s not uncommon to see articles that dismiss LEED as a whole through the lens of single credit and attribute. If one adds up the multiple, myopic reactions, it results in a voluminous discourse of seeming discontent.

Of course most of those voices are simply fighting to maintain the status quo. Unfortunately, the status quo has been running out the clock, resisting change for decades making the need for sustainable design and a sustainable agenda in our society an absolute emergency. LEED has been 15+ years in the making and it is the key change agent that has stirred the sustainable design movement to action. We don’t have any ecological time left to start over, so we should be having a robust dialogue about how to improve it, how to make it more integrative, how to make it make it more effective and how to keep the status quo from co-opting it for their use.

LEED tends to bother a lot of design professionals because it is quantitative instead of qualitative. Design has become an institution obsessed with qualitative issues since the paradigm of cheap energy and easy access to resources took over the world. After all, who needs to be quantitative when there is so much abundance? But with over 6 billion people on a planet facing an ecological crisis, design will need to embrace both the qualitative and quantitative needs of society to be of value. LEED is a great step in the right direction and now we need to couple it up with an improved design process so we can continue the design revolution that is reshaping the way we create our world.

Doug Pierce, AIA, LEED AP

In Plain Sight | Vermillion Falls

2009-08-24T06:00:00.003-05:00

The mighty roar of Vermillion Falls in Hastings (pictured above) is a welcome change from the embarrassing trickle currently on display at Minnehaha Falls in Minneapolis. In order to maintain water levels at Lake Minnetonka, the headwaters of Minnehaha Creek, volume control gates were closed even before our abnormally cool, dry summer began.

The Vermillion River, however, flows unregulated from the Farmington highlands, through Hastings, before splitting into two Mississippi River tributaries (this split is what puts the 'island' in Prairie Island). Like its origins, the park area surrounding Vermillion Falls is also less structured than its Minneapolis contemporary. Because the falls are crammed in a narrow gorge between Hwy 61 and the ConAgra Plant, postcard views are hard to find without a little delinquent hiking.

The falls drop 35 feet, and it was this drop which powered the Graham Flour Mill beginning in the 1850s—the first mill in Minnesota to produce saleable flour. While not quite as high or grand as Minnehaha Falls, Vermillion Falls is certainly winning on spectacle in 2009.

Strip-Mining the Suburban Archaeology: The Keeper of the Flame

2009-08-20T15:25:00.004-05:00

Ah...Summertime. Of the four seasons, it's perhaps the most conducive to suburban life patterns, and few activities seem more iconic of the season than the backyard barbeque.

I remember many a Summer day when my father would preside over his fiery outdoor furnace, cold beer in hand (smile on face), guarding over the flame-licked steaks and fish like some mythical sentinel guarding the Flame of the Gods. Aunts, uncles, cousins, neighbors – they would all eventually find their way into the backyard like bears to a campfire.

Little of this right of passage has changed since Dad's or even Gramp's day: A hot grill, a freshly mowed lawn, a mixed meaty bounty, anxiously waiting (and salivating) family and perhaps a friend or neighbor or two. The backyard has, and continues to remain, an extension of both the suburban home as well as the overall social composition. Like some sunny, insect-riddled second living room, the backyard is an interesting dichotomy: part of a greater, open-air public fabric and a private, invitation-only dominion belonging to the household; belonging to the family.

Before the seemingly fleeting season of the sun is gone again for another year, let us all make our way through the sliding back door and out onto that earthy green carpet where weathered, patinaed furniture cohabitates next to the primal scent of hickory smoke and scorching beef and laughing loved ones beckon. Grab a cold something to drink out of the ice chest, tell an old story or become part of a brand-new one and join the fun.

[A word on the illustration: a layered, combination layout featuring “found archaeological relics” as well as hand-drawn elements. Clockwise from left: a) “Keeper of the Flame” illustration and poster I created featuring hand-drawn character and grill over manipulated photo background – the text bits and arrows make it almost like a theatre poster for some action film, I employ this tactic often to render the otherwise mundane a bit more glamorous…Like 'what if James Bond were helming the grill?'; b) old photo of a full-out vintage California backyard spread with quite a bit of digital manipulation; c) Vintage SPAM bbq ad with heavy digital manipulation and many hand-redrawn bits for effect.]

- David Paul Seymour is a Twin Cities designer, artist and illustrator. More info and prints from this series can be found at www.davidpaulseymour.com.

A Peruvian Eco-resort

2009-08-17T10:16:00.006-05:00

A couple years ago, my wife and I went to Peru. We roughed it (a home-stay in an unheated guest room at 11,000 feet; and four days in a tent on a trek), but we also splurged – for exactly two nights, at the InkaTerra Machu Picchu Pueblo Hotel in Aguas Calientes.

The complex of 85 cottages (arranged in four- or five-cottage buildings) sprawls somewhat randomly on 12 acres of high rainforest. The grounds include a shade-grown coffee plantation, a couple of free-standing restaurants, an orchid sanctuary, and miles of trails that wander near the rushing Urubamba River and some of its small tributary creeks.

Of course, the InkaTerra folks (who operate three such eco-resorts) play up both the luxury of the place and its environmental sensitivity. I was most taken, however, with the way the little white villas were scattered on the hillside.

The whole complex is a careful grading study: white stone pathways climb up and around the buildings, wide stairways move from one plaza level to the next, and each “platform” in the forest becomes an intimate space framed by low walls, lush vegetation, and/or the rocky slope of the hillside itself.

Though the phrase “eco-resort” often conjures images of tents on the savanna or thatched huts in the jungle, to me it’s more about how the buildings and other infrastructure embrace the land – functionally, yes, but creatively, too. Tropical resorts, after all, are about being outside, so one would hope there’s a clever merger between building and landscape. Have you stayed somewhere recently (here or afar) that successfully blended indoors and out? Post it here.

(And this, from nature’s tales of the weird: click here for video of InkaTerra’s disco-dancing, pig-grunting, bright orange bird – the Cock of the Rock.)

Urban Supply and Demand

2009-08-14T08:44:00.006-05:00

Each Monday in June, July, and August Bryant Park in New York, plays host to the HBO Summer Film Festival. To orient you, Bryant Park is located adjacent to the New York Public Library on 42nd Street and 6th Avenue. It is flanked to the north and south by flower beds and surrounded by promenades. The heart of the park is the 1.5 acre expanse of rye/fescue/bluegrass lawn.

During the Summer Film Festival the lawn is closed until 5:00 pm. Just as the office workers in the area are vacating the park to head back to work the soon-to-be movie viewers start to gather. Five o’clock strikes, the ropes are withdrawn, and the gathering turns into a blanket wielding flood of humanity. The video above documenting this tsunami was taken by a colleague of mine from the windows of our 42nd Street office that look onto the park.

Free movies alone do not seem like motivation enough to engage in such behavior. Similar events are held in parks all over the Twin Cities in the summer, and I can’t imagine that the Lake Harriet Bandshell gets bombarded in the same manner as the Bryant Park lawn does. Perhaps this is due to the aggressive nature of New Yorkers and the accommodating nature of Minnesotans (recently one of my co-workers in New York asked me why everyone they knew from Minnesota was so nice). Instead, I’m certain it’s due to the supply and demand of open green space in each city.

The Twin Cities are blessed with an abundance of green space, and New York City pines for it. New Yorkers fiend for open space like the drug addicts that frequented Bryant Park in the 1970’s used to fiend for their narcotic fix. Sure New York City has a few gems like Central Park, Madison Square Park, and the aforementioned Bryant Park, but they lack something and this lacking makes them less desirable than a place like Lake Calhoun or Minnehaha Falls. You never feel like you have left the city when you are in a park in New York City. The parks in New York are surrounded by such urban density that it’s impossible to make cognizant the fact that you have left the city behind and are relaxing in a natural environment. The threshold between urbanity and open space is entirely too abrupt. One moves from urban density to urban sparsity simply by crossing the street. Decreasing the density of the blocks immediately surrounding the parks during the planning process would have been of immeasurable benefit to the city. The parks in New York are not really the urban oases they attempt to be because they don’t allow for the mental escape factor. You are in a park, in the city. You have not escaped into nature.

Mod Minn(ies) : Cargo Cabin

2009-08-12T11:21:00.006-05:00

One reason I find cabins so exciting is the freedom they inspire in the creative mind. Unlike typical homes they aren’t expected to function to the standards of our everyday demands. In fact, a few little twists and anomalies can be welcome distractions to remind us that we need to slow down and enjoy life. To the modernist architect this can provide the inspiration and freedom to invent and break away from normal conventions. Just this spirit inspired Hive Modular’s Paul Stankey to design an affordable modern cabin for his family when their 1940’s camper on his family’s land in Holyoke, MN, no longer kept out the rodents or the rain.

Paul, his wife (who is also an architect), and his brother set out to find a solution that would give both families a comfortable retreat but was as simple and cost effective as possible. Their criteria were to sleep two couples, provide basic heat and be durable for years to come… i.e. no more mice!

Paul happened upon the solution near his home in Northeast Minneapolis: two twenty-foot used shipping containers that he purchased for only $800. The shipping containers where positioned nine feet apart on sonotube footings. A shed roof was framed above them, creating a living room space between. The tops of the shipping containers become sleeping lofts and the whole space is heated (when necessary) with a metal wood-stove placed in the red shipping container.

The interiors are intimate but feel expansive due to the careful use of steel frames and large panes of commercial glass. The walls are lined with birch plywood that plays against the rustic steel corrugation of the boxes, which literally passes from the inside to the outside. Currently the cabin uses a 12-volt lighting system with a gas light back up, and the electricity is replenished with a small PV array. The rain water collected from the roof runs into a cistern that supplies a gray-water plumbing system.

The overall effect is a rustic but fun modern cabin that would make any nature-loving urbanite envious. The project definitely meets Paul’s goals of creating a “balance of old and new, rustic and industrial, cold metal and warm wood.” Although this isn’t necessarily the cabin for the log cabin-loving Minnesotan, it definitely deserves some recognition. Despite a tiny budget a truly fun and inventive cabin was achieved with a basic and challenging palette of materials. It is absolutely a great Mod Minn(ie).

Keep the cabins coming! We’ll continue to feature great modern cabins through the summer. Please post your examples to be considered for the next installment of Mod Minn(ies).

Events | Unbundling the Housing Crisis

2009-08-06T06:00:00.007-05:00

Unbundling the Housing Crisis is an artistic design exhibition conceived by architect Jay Isenberg and his wife, artist and professor Lynda Monick-Isenberg. Inter-disciplinary teams were invited to create thoughtful, creative interventions to re-present the human impacts of a situation that has otherwise characterized by blind greed and cold, cruel facts.

The eight collaborative works feature approaches as varied as their individual members, and the three largest installations are summarized here:

Table of Contents--team led by architect Ralph Nelson--is a twisted game of Monopoly involving banks, bread, explosions, under-the-table dealing, copper, and mold. Real mold. But don't worry, this interactive installation presents a nauseating real estate market in a very sanitary fashion.

PPoD--led by Locus Architecture--offers a pragmatic architectural alternative to the buy-now, pay-later disease found in so much residential development. Watch as a fictional family adds “pods” to their home as they grow, paying as they build. When they've got more house than they need (or can afford), these modules are sold off as necessary.

Ghosts and Shadows—team led by Jay and Lynda, Feyereisen Studios, and Families Moving Forward—is a massive scale model depicting a swath of North Minneapolis 26 blocks wide. Within this area alone, more than 270 houses are vacant, boarded, and condemned. The miniature homes are represented as caskets being lowered into the stark white landscape, leaving behind only the shadows of their stories.

Unbundling the Housing Crisis is on display at the Form+Content Gallery through September 5th.

In Plain Sight | Island Chapel

2009-08-03T06:00:00.002-05:00

On a little island in the middle of one of our 10,000 lakes, a little Minnesotan Taj Mahal overlooks the landscape. Originally envisioned as both a shrine to the Holy Mother and as a burial place for its benefactress, Wilhelmine Coolbaugh, the modest Island Chapel looks out on one of the grandest vistas at the campus of Northwestern College in Roseville.

The chapel was completed in 1926, and while it may be diminutive in size, Coolbaugh’s vision (and wealth) ensured it would not be short on quality. Designed by architects Maginnis and Walsh, the chapel is constructed of a granite base, marble floor, double limestone walls, and hardlead roof cresting.

Today, even though the ornate stained glass windows have been removed (along with Wilhelmine’s remains), Island Chapel is a tiny, beautiful relic in a large, beautiful landscape.

Strip-Mining the Suburban Archaeology: an introductory post | David Paul Seymour

2009-07-30T08:33:00.006-05:00

I am an illustrator, artist, and product designer with a background in architecture. I want to make that clear from the start because I am planning to post here from the art/illustration perspective, not the architectural perspective. These viewpoints, however, are, of course, related. My background in architecture informs my art and art can (should) inform architecture.

This column, then, will range outside typical “architectural” writing, but I’ll try to keep it applicable.

My focus will be on “Suburban Archaeology:” The examination and understanding of the social, economic, and aesthetic richness that forever changed the dynamic of Americana starting at the end of World War II (see, not so far afield).

Celebrated, attacked, and/or embraced in these contemporary times by thinkers, doers, and critics ranging from Andres Duany to William Howard Kunstler to Robert Beauregard to so many others, American suburbia has seen a crazed and unpredictable series of changes since its infancy. What began as a promise and a trumpet call of prosperity – of how we were faring as a society and a superpower – the creative and happy-go-lucky landscape of white-picket-fence suburbia has slowly morphed into something perhaps unintended: a mish-mash of old decrepit pockets and scattered attempts at fresh and creative languages juxtaposed against uninteresting new development.

I don’t plan on looking at suburbia with beaten-dead scathing complaints about how things are and how much better they were back in grandpa’s time. Rather, I will make simple observations and tell small stories, using few words and plenty of colorful visual wit crafted from found images culled from the forgotten dirt of “Suburban Archaeology:” photos, advertisements, mementos and such from a different time juxtaposed against similar images from our own time.

Much like Billy Pilgrim’s view of life in Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse Five,” we’ll take a look at suburbia via, let’s say, museum vignettes, as a way to simply value where we’ve been, where we’re at, and where we’re going. Enjoy.

L.Architecture: Behind the Levee

2009-07-27T08:16:00.004-05:00

There aren’t many examples of contemporary residential architecture in Grand Forks, ND. I was up there recently touring the Red River Greenway, a more than 2000-acre open space implemented after the great floods of 1997. Mostly, the region is a sea of quaint neighborhoods with quaint 1920s – 1950s bungalows, ranches, and the like surrounded by treeless subdivisions of new millennium vinyl and faux stone mini-mansions.

But I found a couple of notables. Strangely, they seem attracted to the Greenway.

That’s a house in the Elmwood neighborhood, just south of downtown Grand Forks. Melanie Parvey, who was the City of Grand Forks’ Greenway coordinator through much of the design’s implementation (and who was bicycling with me on that sunny, cool day in June) said that this house was built, of course, after the new floodwall. When this particular access point was proposed, the neighborhood was vehemently against it. But a bird-lover with an open mind centered her front door smack-dab on this little landscape window.

Debate the merits of the building all you want, but it was deliberately designed – in its angular layout and entrance location -- to take advantage of the new landscape across the street. Closer to downtown, there’s an even bolder (when compared to its surroundings) home.

And yes, it sits immediately adjacent to another opening in the floodwall (on the left side of the photo below).

So why are these green space accesses attracting contemporary architecture? Are the kind of people that see the benefit of a massive, multi-state, river-centered park also those who see the benefit of a uniquely-designed home? Are the people who can afford land near these accesses the same ones that can afford to hire architects? Either way, there is some kind of interface happening here between the Greenway and the home.

Unfortunately, design credits can be hard to track down, do I don’t know who designed these. If you do (especially if it’s you), post it here. (The Greenway itself, incidentally, was planned by North Carolina-based Greenways, Inc. and detailed by Damon Farber Associates.)

Transplanted | Urban Recreation

2009-07-25T19:01:00.008-05:00

The town I grew up in is a small, rural town in southeast Minnesota. Being small and rural, the area of the town allocated for recreational use was scant. This was due in part to the small population of the town, but also, because it was a farming community, the land was more valuable to till than to turn into multiple ball fields. Each of the three grade schools (one Catholic, one Lutheran, and one Public) had a playground and there was a municipal park in the center of the town which held the high school, baseball, softball, and soccer/football fields. I always remember there being friction between the various teams. This friction wasn’t due to the cliquey nature of adolescence. It was due to the fact that there was a limited area of ground for each of them to practice on. The football team wanted the municipal field to be exclusively the football field. The soccer team wanted the municipal field to be exclusively the soccer field, and the baseball team wanted their outfield back.

One would assume that this friction between sporting entities due to scarcity of land would directly translate to a place like New York, a place where the land is more valuable to build upon than to leave to amateur recreation. I have found, however, that this is not necessarily the case. Each Thursday I play a pick-up game of soccer in East River Park. The area of the park we play on is large enough to have two baseball diamonds side-by-side. Within this area, simultaneously, there are two Little League baseball games, Little League baseball batting and fielding practice, a rugby club practice, an Ultimate Frisbee club practice, and our pick-up soccer game. Every once in a while a baseball will roll into our game, or someone will have to dodge an errant Frisbee, but generally each sport keeps to its section of the field and respects the other sports.

Much can be learned from this cooperative means of recreation. Each sport has its own rules and thus its own spatial boundaries. Lines don’t necessarily have to be drawn on the ground, and walls don’t necessarily need to be erected upon it. The quarantine of our urban recreational spaces to one sport equals one field is unnecessary as long as the rules are obeyed and mutual respect is present.

Why it Works: Glensheen

2009-07-22T15:37:00.008-05:00

Another installment of "Why it Works," the semi-regular column on the principles of design, was published in the July/August issue of Architecture MN. There is, of course, some audio to go along with it.

What makes Glensheen work? Listen for yourself. Visit treeline.podbean.com or search for "treeline" on iTunes. Enjoy!

Mod Minn(ies) : Ralph Rapson’s Glass Cube

2009-07-20T11:37:00.004-05:00

I am inspired by all that is modern. From thinly profiled chairs to urban skylines, I am riveted by finely detailed elements shaped by modern masters. In many cases the real genius of material is best expressed at the smallest scale. Here in Minnesota we have a wonderful tradition of careful modernist detailing, and in Mod Minn(ies) we will seek out those homegrown modern morsels.

For me few regional architects exemplify modern Minnesota more than our beloved Ralph Rapson. Perhaps his greatest small project was the Glass Cube cabin which he built for his own family in 1974 as a retreat from their busy life in Minneapolis. This personal project freed Rapson to experiment with a modern vocabulary without the normal constraints of urban planning and public opinion. It was modern architecture sans the nags of professional realities. To Rapson the countryside of Wisconsin was an unadulterated intellectual wilderness waiting to be explored with new ideas of home. Rapson felt strongly that the expanse of the country provided the ideal setting for modern ideas, stating in his recent book "I always thought a country house should be different from a city house." He believed that “In the country, the modernist would prevail.”

The family chose a forty-acre parcel in Amery, Wisconsin, just outside of Minneapolis. The site is shaped by the Apple River which winds through its pine woods and pastoral meadows. According to Rapson’s son Rip, many design iterations were considered until finally Rapson pushed away from more traditional ideas of buildings and dissolved the walls with glass. The cube was positioned on the back of the tallest hill to provide 360-degree views of the land below, while also taking advantage of cool cross winds for ventilation. Although the idea of the glass house was not new at the time, this glass cabin’s mastery draws more from its gentle positioning within the landscape and the way large walls open to the outside, while the floors are suspended inside, invoking the feeling of floating in the rural scenery surrounding the house. No doubt this tiny glass box held many kernels of inspiration for many of our modern sustainable houses of today. It is simply a Mod Minn(ie) masterpiece.

Do you know other examples of great modern cabins or other tiny mod structures in the region? Please post your examples to be considered for the next installment of Mod Minn(ies).

Guest Post | Jim Lammers, FAIA

2009-07-14T07:59:00.001-05:00

To the Editor:
The subject matter of the last issue of Architecture Minnesota seemed very inappropriate in these times of deep recession—people out of work, record foreclosures, more homeless than ever—yet we have the audacity to publish cabins. Amid all the economic chaos we highlight those who can afford two homes and some are architects even. Many of us are doing work which makes a difference in people’s lives, we’re doing pro bono work, we are needed. But this issue marginalizes us and our profession.

In Plain Sight | MLAC

2009-07-05T22:58:00.003-05:00

I was once told that the simplest way to destroy a house is to cut a 12 inch-square hole in the roof. Then wait.

Nature has a relentless ability to reclaim what we have borrowed from her, and we should expect that drastic measures will be required for long-term loans whether they are houses, roads, or books. The mission of the Minnesota Library Access Center at the UMN is to preserve rare volumes of the written word, and the archive is a prime example of our human attempts to delay the inevitability of nature.

Housed underground in 600'-long caverns below the West Bank campus (and below a solid layer of limestone), 2.5 million rare books and periodicals will eventually be stored here. In an attempt to stave off decomposition of these precious works, the storage facility is built of a double concrete wall system, waterproofed with multiple membranes, lit with special lamps, and kept a constant 62 degrees with 50% relative humidity.

If you've driven down West River Parkway, you may have seen the two truck-sized delivery doors which have been cut in the side of the river bank. Will nature have any trouble with this one?

Arcitectural Pilgrimage | Fallingwater

2009-06-25T12:12:00.014-05:00

Each month until December the AIA will run a feature piece on Frank Lloyd Wright’s masterpiece on Bear Run creek in rural Pennsylvania. The six part series will explore all things Fallingwater.

Two years ago, on a brilliant October morning, two colleagues and I set off from New York City (the images above are courtesy of them, Jimmy Chang and Yen-Ming Lee, as my camera died upon arrival at Fallingwater). Six hours later we were observing for ourselves the iconic image heretofore only seen in the many Frank Lloyd Wright books one receives from friends and family when they find out you like architecture and are from the Midwest.

I had visited the Willey House in Minneapolis and the Johnson Wax Headquarters in Racine, WI so I had a certain expectation of what this visit would entail. We would be walked around by a guide, we would take photos, we would respect the quality of the work, and we would get back in our car.

Instead I was awestruck.

It’s tough to compose that sentence and have the reader not think I’m injecting hyperbole, but that was my honest reaction. The building was destined to be on that site and be composed as it was composed. Further, it was seemingly made to be visited in the fall. The way the building’s palette interacts with the oranges, reds, and browns of nature’s palette in the fall creates a visual harmony. The trail that meanders around the property offers both glimpses and grand vistas of the building.

Not only is it a great piece to be viewed it is an equally great place to view from. The expansive balconies open to views of the creek and the ravine it cuts through. The circulation areas frame natural vignettes. The interior spaces offer a great variety of spatiality, something I greatly enjoy about Frank Lloyd Wright’s work and appreciate when it is found in architecture in general. The living area on the first level leans toward the panoramic. It is architectural space as a widescreen viewer. Conversely, the stair, hallways, and bedrooms are short and intimate. To put it in aspect ratio terms, the living space is a 16:9 and the stair, bedrooms, and hallways are a 4:3.

The restoration of the building has left it immaculate even though it is traversed by 120,000 visitors each year. I highly recommend that you make the journey to take in one of the great pieces of American architecture, and to be one of those 120,000 people in the near future.

Adam Regn Arvidson, ASLA l L.Architecture l Aqua's Roof Garden

2009-06-23T08:47:00.007-05:00

This is Aqua:

It's a nearly-complete residential tower in Chicago's brand new Lakeshore East mega-development, designed by Studio Gang and obviously best known for those undulating (aquatically-inspired, might we say) balconies. Images of this groundbreaking addition to Chicago's venerable skyline are hardly rare, but less well known is this:

It's a 80,000 square foot roof garden on top of the third floor. The rendering is by Loewenberg Architects, a local firm that is primarily the design arm of Aqua's development company. The garden itself is the work of Wolff Landscape Architecture, whose offices are mere blocks away on Michigan Avenue.

A few weeks ago, I toured it with Wolff's Ben Baker, who gave me the stats: a 1/5 mile running track, pool, fire pits, a yoga garden, and Styrofoam-supported berms up to eight feet tall. The whole thing is inspired by the work of Roberto Burle Marx, and is comprised of biomorphic raised beds with radiused corners. Here it is under construction:

The garden is one of Aqua's biggest selling points, according to marketing vice president Tricia VanHorn. She told me that "luxury is out; no one wants to pay for it. It's all about lifestyle now." Lifestyle, indeed. Yoga gardens? Sounds pretty luxurious.

But whatever you call it, to me it's the essence of L.Architecture: the seamlessness of building and landscape. Aside from the expression of the amorphic, curvilinear building balconies in the roof terrace planting beds, the landscape and building share some functional synergy. The terrace is the view from the building, so anything but a well-composed landscape would detract. The spaces within the building that directly access the terrace are the for-rent community rooms (which spill directly out into the large grill-and-gazebo areas) and the fitness center (one floor below and connected to the roof by a stairway in an open atrium).

But the building and landscape also work together from a marketing / sales standpoint. As we stood amidst the raw concrete and Styrofoam, VanHorn suggested to me that while the building brings people to the door, it's the amenities that sell the condos.

Have you seen other good examples of L.Architecture? Drop me a hint and I'll get more info and post it here.

True Sustainability

2009-06-16T09:15:00.009-05:00

I visited an ad hoc elementary school in Surakarta that used an old semi, a shipping container, a bus and train car as class rooms. The children had adorned every inch of them, painting murals and plastering them with homework assignments and art projects. The entire school was off every grid and built from virtually 100% recycled content. It made me think how silly it would be to even attempt LEED certification for a place like this. USGBC hasn't conceived of a rating high enough to encapsulate the social, environmental and economic innovation of this place. And so began a clearer sense for me of what true sustainability might be.

I suppose, we first have to ask ourselves what we're trying to sustain. To think we have the power to save the planet is probably a bit arrogant. And if we really wanted to, we might quickly conclude the planet is perfectly capable of sustaining itself with or without us. So, sustainability is really about sustaining ourselves, the human race, not because we're selfish, but simply because it's all we're capable of controlling. Of course the fear of this mentality is the pitfall of preserving human life at all costs. However, the one distinction we now make, versus decades ago, is that we are a part of nature rather than in opposition to it. We know the importance of a balanced ecosystem in our own survival.

This might lead us to see sustainability as the continuing survival of the human race through preservation of the environment. Wandering through that tiny school, though, made me believe sustainability is not purely biological, but rather the capacity for the human race to preserve humanity.

Perhaps sustainability should be less concerned with natural science and more with global health, social equity and economic stability. Perhaps, if we work to preserve humanity, we will inherently achieve ecological balance, just like that small school on the island of Java.

Guest Post | Chuck Liddy

2009-06-16T09:05:00.001-05:00

There is more attention now being focused on the Fort Snelling Upper Post (July/August Architecture Minnesota, pages 42-47) area than at any time in the past 30 years. Since 2007, both the National Park Service and National Trust for Historic Preservation have awarded grants—NPS to help mothball the structures and NTHP to define new development locations—and the State Legislature has also provided rehabilitation funds. There also finally is dialogue and coordination taking place between the DNR, Hennepin County, NPS, MHS, and other area stakeholders; and the County is currently soliciting proposals for LRT Station Area Master Planning services for the entire Ft. Snelling area east of the LRT line, south of the Mississippi River, west of the Minnesota River, and north of the airport. The Master Plan will further identify where and what type of new development in the area may be appropriate and at what density. For example, more intensive new commercial and residential development closer to the LRT line and outside of the historic district may help economically with less intensive and more appropriate new development and building reuse within the landmark area.

The existing buildings at the Upper Post currently cover approximately 10 percent of the land outside of the golf course and ball fields, and although nearly 35 acres of land where new buildings could be built on the Upper Post have been identified by the NTHP funded study, they are concentrated in the southwest corner of the site on the current golf course and in the southeast corner behind the barracks buildings. Building reuses should be carefully considered to fit the building, not the other way around. New development coverage should be similar to the existing, 10%, and heights should generally be limited to those of the existing buildings on the Upper Post so that new development doesn’t dwarf the historic buildings and open space.

Events | UMore Park

2009-06-15T12:40:00.007-05:00

Above: Concrete remnants of the Gopher Ordnance Works (Photo by Brandon Stengel)

We've already written about the strange history of the Gopher Ordnance Works, a WWII ammunition factory which now exists only as 5,000 desolate acres of Rosemount, Minnesota.

At the monthly AIA Minneapolis luncheon on Thursday, June 18th, you can hear about its future. Jeff McMenimen from HKGi will give an overview of the Concept Master Plan for UMore Park, a new sustainable community planned for the area.

Click here for more details about the event.

Above: Proposed neighborhood center at UMore Park (Rendering courtesy of HKGi)

The Other World

2009-05-27T14:41:00.005-05:00

I know the paradigm of three worlds still exists, perhaps the more culturally sensitive term now is "developing nations". Either way, it seems clear to me that there are two, and they co-exist in every country throughout the world now. Call it urbanization, globalization, or any of a host of -ations you can muster. What's clear is the growing contrast between the rich and the poor in the world. Today, 85% of the world's population makes less than $5 a day while 10% makes more than $50 a day. With only 5% of the population now making up the 10 fold difference, it seems pretty clear that the second world has all but disappeared. There is no more global middle class.

Driving through Jakarta, the urban landscape tells the same story with seas of slums and luxurious high rises as their backdrop amidst clouds of smog. On that journey to the airport, a simple, albeit phenomenally complex, truth was revealed to me. The cloud of smog comes from our world, the $50+ world, that consumes too much. And the massive spread of preventable disease comes from the other world.

Perhaps sustainability needs a new, practical definition. If we really want to make the world better, we should probably just design ways of living that consume less. And if we really want to preserve humanity, we should probably just focus on designing public health.