Walker Art Center to examine the suburbs
The Walker Art Center plans to dive into the world of McMansions, strip malls and women in pink bathrobes staring at clouds in their expansive backyards ... beginning February 16. That's when Worlds Away: New Suburban Landscapes opens at the Minneapolis modern art museum. The Walker's PR folks say the show is "the first major museum exhibition to examine both the art and architecture of the contemporary American suburb and its catalytic role in the creation of new art." Worlds Away is organized by the Walker in association with the Heinz Architectural Center, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh. The show will feature "more than 75 works ranging from paintings and photographs to architectural models, sculptures and videos that explore a variety of suburban conditions." The photo accompanying this post is by Angela Strassheim.

New look for '08
It's not 2008 yet, but we decided to get a head start on things with a new look for the Building Minnesota blog. It's white. It's sleek. It's modern. What do you think? Do you love it or hate it? Post your comments. And thanks for your support.

All I want for Xmas ...
I asked a couple dozen architects and preservationists what book they'd like to most give or receive this holiday season. A few of them took the time to jot down their favorites, which are listed below. I'd like to hear from you, too. Add your selections in the comments section.

Jim Dayton, James Dayton Design
I love Michelangelo's huge new monograph from Taschen. He was the master of all things. And he's still an inspiration. Architecture Now! 5, also from Taschen. (Taschen makes really good glossy books.)

I'm also inspired by movies. I love the documentary film Helvetica. We should all be as simple and elegant as these designers.

Other choices: Diller + Scofidio (+ Renfro): The Ciliary Function. This book highlights some of the best work in the world today.

Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster, by Mike Davis. Mike has been writing ecological criticism for a long time, way before it became hip. This is scary stuff.

Carlo Scarpa: Architecture and Design.

David Adjaye: Making Public Buildings.

And most of all, The Simpsons Movie.

Bob Roscoe, Design for Preservation
In How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built, Stewart Brand, also known as the creator of the Whole Earth Catalog, instructs us the materiality of those structures in which we spend so much of our time somehow seem to possess an animate ability to find ways to seek transformation into new uses. Is this a survival mechanism that buildings have, that can overcome the vicissitudes of time, weathering, whims of fashion, maladroit alterations, and human indifference to find ways (occasionally) that we can love them? For people who appreciate buildings for their accommodation, history and beauty, I don't recommend reading this book -- I demand it.

Geoffrey Warner, Alchemy Architects
I'm reading Memorial: A Novel, by Bruce Wagner.
It centers around some lucid and perverse "starchitect" observations. I checked it out at the library because I liked the cover (of course!) and laughed out loud at the internal dialogues that the main character had about Zaha Hadid and her kin.


John Dwyer, Shelter Architecture
I'd have to go with Geographies of New Orleans, by Rich Campanella. It's the only book I've ever read that really gives a full understanding of New Orleans, its relationship to Katrina, and the role of design in the Future Geographies of the city. A must read for any American citizen.

Charlene Roise, Hess, Roise and Company
How about the 2008 Minnesota Historic Architecture Calendar? OK, so it is not a book, but with a gorgeous photo of a wonderful historic building every month, it is indeed a gift that keeps giving. There are two photos of the Washburn A Mill that I really like. One was taken by John Stark, before it was renovated, with re-bars sprouting from the tops of freestanding columns like a bad-hair day. The other, by Pete Sieger, is a straight-on shot of the ragged wall of the old mill with the sleek curtain wall behind; it is a masterful photo of a masterful rehab that combined an elegant modern design with the rusticated remnants of a nineteenth-century monument. I look at those photos and rejoice that the building was saved.

Beth Nelson, Alchemy Architects
I recommend The Smallest Book in the World, by Joshua Reichert and Planned Assault: The Nofamily House, Love/House, Texas Zero, by Lars Lerup. Both are beautifully produced -- as great as "objects" as they are content-wise. The tiny one is just ridiculously cool; I don't know what else to say about it (Did you see the picture of the tweezers holding the book? INSANE!). The Planned Assaults book is one you can read over and over again and find something new each time. It's so clever, but in a perverse, devious way that particularly appeals to weirdo architects. So I guess the first one could be a "give" or a "receive," but the second is more of a "receive," or "give, but mostly to other architects."

Jennifer Yoos, VJAA
My new favorite coffee table-type design books this year are Naoto Fukasawa (pictured at left) and Structure As Space: Engineering and Architecture in the Work of Jurg Conzett and Partners. Naoto Fukasawa is a designer of products and environments -- formerly with Ideo, plusminuszero and then Muji. His work is beautiful and he sees function as intuitive and sometimes humorous.

Two other recent favorites: In the Bubble: Designing in A Complex World by John Thackera and Taking Shape: A New Contract Between Architecture and Nature by Susanna Hagan.

Bryan Carpenter, Alchemy Architects
Bernd & Hilla Becher did a number of photographs of "Typologies," (grain elevators, water towers, blast furnaces. ..) all industrial structures of the past century. The interplay of the collective images, the starkness of the black and white photographs, and scale of project and body of work is truly mesmerizing. They are not "architecture" books per se, but any fan of architecture will enjoy this body of work.

Endangered New Orleans
In 2006, the National Trust for Historic Preservation announced that all20 historic districts in New Orleans were part of its Most Endangered Historic Places list. Nicolai Ouroussoff, New York Times architecture critic, believes it's almost too late to save many buildings in America's funkiest city. Ouroussoff reports that the federal government wants to knock down nearly all public housing projects in the city, even well-built, historically significant apartments constructed during the New Deal era.

"If the government gets its way, a rich architectural legacy will be supplanted by private, mixed-income developments with pitched roofs and wood-frame construction, an ersatz vision of small-town America. That this could happen in a city that still largely lies in ruins is both sad and grotesque," Ouroussoff writes.

The New York Times article is available here.

Charlene Roise: Why we should save the Metrodome
Charlene Roise of Hess, Roise and Company ponders what historic buildings might be endangered in Minneapolis in the January issue of Minnesota Monthly. Her picks might strike some readers as quirky because her definition of what's worth saving isn't based solely on age or aesthetics. She believes many newer buildings, including the Metrodome, Minneapolis Public Service Center and Orchestra Hall, may be worth protecting from demolition in the decades ahead.

About the Metrodome, she says, "We shouldn’t just toss it out without talking about it." After all, its roof is an engineering feat.

Roise and Minnesota Monthly aren't the only ones contemplating the Metrodome's future. The Metropolitan Sports Facilities Commission, the public agency that operates the Minneapolis domed stadium, hired a consulting firm to write a report on its future. The commission is also sponsoring a series of public meetings on what to do after the Minnesota Twins and Minnesota Gophers depart. (Actually, the commission points out that the rent paid by the Minnesota Vikings -- $6 million annually -- is enough to keep the building open for less popular events like high school football tournaments, etc.)

Here's the open house schedule:

• Moorhead -- Tuesday, Jan. 8
• St. Cloud -- Wednesday, Jan. 9
• Duluth -- Thursday, Jan. 10
• Marshall -- Tuesday, Jan. 15
• Minneapolis -- Wednesday, Jan. 16

What do you think? Should we save the Metrodome? What's your favorite part of the stadium -- the fluffy roof or the swooshing air-forced doors? What's your least favorite part of the stadium -- the nosebleed seats, the crink-in-your-neck third base baseball seats, the carpet, the poofy right field wall, the metal urinals in the men's room, the concrete, the concrete or the concrete?

Development Update: St. Louis Park and Uptown Minneapolis
The Star Tribune reports that St. Louis Park's West End development got the green light from its city council earlier this week. Duke Realty is planning to build a $400 million hotel, office and retail complex on a site near the corner of I-394 and Highway 100. St. Louis Park sees this as a "gateway" to the city.

News isn't as upbeat in Minneapolis. Stuart Ackerberg of the Ackerberg Group told a Star Tribune reporter that his firm would decide in the next 12 days whether it plans to proceed with Mozaic, a fancy hotel/condo/movie complex slated for the Lagoon Theatre site near Lagoon and Hennepin Avenues. "We plan to tell people who have put down deposits by the end of the year if we're going to be able to proceed with condos. ... I'm not optimistic," he said.

Student ideas for the future of St. Paul's Ford plant
Architecture students at the University of Minnesota will present their proposals on what to do with a soon-to-be-defunct Ford Motor Companies Twin Cities Assemblies Plant. Ford is due to stop manufacturing pickup trucks at the Highland Park site in St. Paul in 2009.

According to a press release from the university, "The final-year students, from professor Lance Neckar's Landscape Architecture studio and professor John Comazzi's architecture studio, have spent the semester creating research and design proposals for the plant. With a focus on remediation of the site, the students have considered in-situ processes such as phyto-remediation, bio-remediation, engineered solutions and ground and surface water cleaning."

You can see the designs for yourself on Wednesday evening (5:30 - 7:30 p.m.) at Rapson Hall, 89 Church Street SE, Minneapolis. More information is available here.

'I Bought a Little City'
Until a few months ago, I'd never heard of the short story writer Donald Barthelme. The New Yorker fiction podcast clued me in to this absurdist minimalist and his story "I Bought a Little City," published in 1974. Barthelme, who died in 1989, was raised in a modern house, designed by his architect father. And in "I Bought a Little City," you get a sense of this worldview.

The story, which is collected in a book called Sixty Stories, available at Micawbers bookstore in St. Paul and by that soulless corporate giant Amazon, centers on a narrator who buys a little city (Galveston, Texas) and goes about changing it, slowly. He adds a park. But to do that, he needs to kick people out of their homes. So then he needs to build them new homes.

Here's an excerpt from "I Bought a Little City":

"So what kind of a place would you like to live in?" I asked him.
"Well," he said, "not too big."

"Uh-huh."
"Maybe with a veranda around three sides," he said, "so we could sit on it and look out. A screened porch, maybe."
"Whatcha going to look out at?"
"Maybe some trees and, you know, the lawn."
"So you want some ground around the house."
"That would be nice, yeah."
"'Bout how much ground are you thinking of?"
"Well, not too much."
"You see, the problem is, there's only x amount of ground and everybody's going to want to have it to look at and at the same time they don't want to be staring at the neighbors. Private looking, that's the thing."
"Well, yes," he said. "I'd like it to be kind of private."

Writer Donald Antrim reads the whole darn story in the New Yorker podcast, which is available at iTunes.

weeHouse open house
Don't get invited to enough holiday parties? Well, you might want to check out Alchemy Architects open house at its mega-weeHouse, which will take place from 4 - 7 p.m. on Friday, Dec. 14 at 4221 Ewing Avenue South, Minneapolis. I interviewed Geoffrey Warner of Alchemy Architects two years ago about his firm's tiny prefab. "The ideal promise is you can go into a store or press a button on a website and have a house delivered," Warner says. Or you can customize your weeHouse, like the owners of the Ewing Avenue house did (as pictured in photo, above). I look forward to seeing you there; I'll be the guy with the camera in one hand and a beer in the other.

Edina's 'monster homes'
Major changes in neighborhoods are tricky. Sometimes it's progress. Sometimes it's an eyesore. Depends on your point-of-view. A lot of the people on Oaklawn Avenue in Edina are angry that a new 5,400-square-foot "monster house" is being built on their street. (See Star Tribune story and watch the YouTube video, posted above.) Earlier this week, it appeared that the Edina City Council was ready to place a moratorium on the construction of these very large houses in neighborhoods populated by midsize, 20th century homes. But at its December 4 meeting, the Star Tribune reported that the council choose not to act on the issue.

Sooch on developer Dean D. Johnson
In today's paper, St. Paul Pioneer Press columnist Joe Soucheray muses on Dean D. Johnson, the Brussels-based developer the paper dubbed as "mysterious" on Monday. Johnson, as has been noted here and here in recent days, has big plans for revitalizing the city's downtown and hiring top-notch architecture talent to do it.

Sooch, like many observers, is excited by the prospect of a man with deep pockets, vision and is a hometown boy. "Man alive, let's go, here," writes Sourcheray. But the columnist also cautions that St. Paul has seen its share of developers who "dazzled us with their sharply cut suits and inflections of various European accents."

St. Paul 'outsider' wants to reshape city's downtown
Great article in today's Pioneer Press on the mysterious Dean D. Johnson, the St. Paul boy who grew up in the Dayton's Bluff and Payne-Phalen neighborhoods, graduated from Hamline University and then went to Europe. He made a lot of money and now fashions himself a developer. And get this -- he loves talented architects.

Johnson proposes two big changes for downtown St. Paul. He's one of two developers that wants to remake the Ramsey County Jail site overlooking the Misssissippi River into condos, but he's hired Harvard Huniversity Professor Toshiko Mori as his architect. His firm -- Wingfield Corp. N.V. of Brussels, Belgium -- has also hired London architect David Adjaye to design a 40-story hotel/office/condo project called Wabasha Tower on a vacant lot across the street from Macy's, also in downtown St. Paul.

Let's see. The guy has money (his firm already owns the land for the proposed hotel/office/condo project). He's local (in a way). And he hires architects unafraid of risk taking. So what's the problem?

"What I say is, 'Why don't you get one project gong and then start talking about the others?" says Dave Thune, St. Paul council member.

Says John Manillo of the CapitolRiver Council, "He's going around buying [land] and nobody knows the guy, and he hasn't done anything yet."

Two other quick points: Andrew Baluveldt, design director at the Walker Art Center, describes the hotel/office/condo skyscraper designed by Adjaye this way: "If you took a regular rectangular building and put two slices into it and jogged out the middle section -- it's kind of a feat." You can watch Adjaye's presenation at Walker Channel, the museum's source for archived video. He shows slides of the St. Paul design near the end of the presentation.

And finally, Dean J. Johnson loves his hometown. He says its downtown is much more similar to NYC than that city across the river. "It feels much more like TriBeCa or SoHo than anything in Minneapolis."

Ouch.