Bearden Place Competition | Jay Isenberg

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. Read More......

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

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. Read More......

Can Smart Neighborhood Design Reduce Foreclosures? | Heather Beal

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. Read More......

Guest Post | Matt Olson

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.”

Read More......

Guest Post | Jim Lammers, FAIA

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. Read More......

Guest Post | Chris Hudson

In the Conundra department in the May/June issue of Architecture Minnesota, Milwaukee architect and 2008 AIA Minnesota Honor Awards juror Sebastian Schmaling, AIA, writes the following:

“Minnesota is home to a diverse group of highly skilled professionals whose protagonists are designing notable buildings not only in their own state but all over the globe, arguably raising the creative bar for their colleagues here and abroad. But there is a noticeable tendency that I will call the Scandinavian-ization of architecture—a regionalist design approach based on a sanitized Northern European vernacular—that can be seen in a portion of Minnesota’s residential architecture and, if unabated, may diminish its overall reputation in the design world.”

Is this a fair assessment? If not, what in your mind separates quality regionally rooted design from lower-quality work? Read More......

Toronto's Waterfront | Adam Arvidson

Over the past few years, I’ve had the privilege of traveling to Toronto and watching the ambitious (but slow) revitalization of that city’s waterfront. Canada’s largest burg has very large plans, backed by billions of dollars and managed by one agency with control over all the public land between the Gardiner Expressway and Lake Ontario.

Waterfront Toronto has called in some big design names, too: Rotterdam-based West 8; Canadian stars Janet Rosenberg, Claude Cormier, and Phillips Farevaag Smallenberg; and perennial national award winners Field Operations and Michael Van Valkenburgh. About half of the major projects have been conceived through international design competitions.

Considering the fact that Toronto’s industrial waterfront is not that unlike Minnesota’s Mississippi River and Lake Superior edges, I got to wondering where our big flashy designs are. True, there was Saint Paul’s Greenberg Plan (now more than a decade old), which continues to guide the city. And there was that 2003 design competition for the Head/Sack House (now a part of the upper landing development). But with just a few exceptions (namely the new Guthrie and Mill Ruins Park), most recent projects have left me wanting more.

Am I wrong? Does anyone have favorites? Frustrations? Should we be having more design competitions?

Read More......

Guest Post | Chris Hudson

The January/February issue of Architecture Minnesota debuts a new department—45 Degrees North, by Threshold editor John Dwyer, AIA (see John’s related post below)—and this prompted the magazine staff to take stock of all the front-of-magazine features we’ve introduced since the redesigned Architecture Minnesota hit newsstands in March 2006. (See my Editor’s Note for a gloss of the new departments.) We’d love to hear your thoughts! Is 45 Degrees North off to a good start? Which departments do you most look forward to reading? Which is your least favorite? And do you have ideas for how to improve it? Read More......

Guest Post | Doug Pierce

Even though Sri Lanka and Minnesota have very different climates and we are far from being an island, a project like Embassy Medical Center in Minnesota could share many of the same features - a concrete frame; a building orientation that takes advantage of the sun; exterior shading, etc. The building form is still Ok, although it's proportions might change some to adapt to the cold winters.

I'm probably going to get in trouble with the Engineers here, but I know my technical limits as an Architect and I know we need the them for the heavy calculus -- so here are some big ideas on the 'mechanics'...

The basic energy strategies could be similar. Given the fact that we are surrounded by arable land, the facility could lease or by farmland (lots!), grow organic food crops for the patients, the cafeteria and the community, then use much of the non-nutritional crop residue in the high-temperature digester to create bio-gas. Some residue would be returned to the land as fertilizer. Digesters take very little water, so unlike corn ethanol, it would not be competing with other water uses. Plus the energy return is very good. The farm equipment could even be run with the digester bio-gas.

We have good solar access here, so the solar thermal domestic hot water would continue to be a good choice. In some ways, the sun is an underutilized resource, so if you have room, it's important to use it when you can. There's a finite amount of bio-mass available and we're going to need it for a wide range of things as oil continues to be more scarce over the next few decades.

Minnesota has outstanding resources, so we actually have more options available than Sri Lanka. For example, from an energy conservation side - earth tubes for pre-tempering make-up air before it enters the HVAC system could work here, but the ground temperature was to hot in Sri Lanka. You'd would need allot and you'd have to flush them clean on regular basis to avoid mold.

Wind electric, heat pumps and geo-thermal exchange are a nice combination for much of greater Minnesota. If the project was outside of a major metro area, in a windy location; three, four, maybe five big turbines could probably power it much of the time. This would shift the energy strategy from being what I like to think of as 'heat-centric' to 'electric-centric.' You might even use the wind to siphon air through the earth tubes, saving energy. You can't really 'use up' the wind, and like the sun, it's an underutilized resource making it a kind of 'ecological free ride' for the moment if you can catch some.

Even with the wind power, you'd still want the digester as a back-up when the wind is low and for times when you might need more domestic hot water than the solar thermal is providing. Since the digester must consistently compost 24 / 7 all year long to be effective, you would store bio-gas and then sell the surplus to the rest to the local community. The digester would also take care of sewage for the hospital and the community at large. A good constructed wetland would take of the remaining effluent. Read More......