The daily digest of Twin Cities culture | Secrets of the City

Yeah! I have a pride boner.

The L.A. Times gave a rave review for the new Guthrie.

Why impress them with substance when you can impress them with style? I still don't like the Walker addition or the new central library. Could Minneapolis possibly find more cost effective means of raising its profile (in a good way)?

Forget it, Max. It's Chinatown.

Maybe these buildings look better from planes.

The view from here?

Blech!

So, because Champs' personally doesn't like the Walker, we need to raise our profile other ways? Seems to me places like the Walker raise our profile by what goes on INSIDE their buildings too.

Although, when I look at that brutalist new MIA wing, I wonder why zillion-dollar Michael Graves was brought in to make something that a local firm could do much cheaper--and likely more tastefully. But that's just my opinion.

Rex is so knowledgable about pillars!

While I still have one giant throbbing boner for this great PR, my other boner lost some steam from this:

MINNEAPOLIS INSTITUTE OF ARTS: The city's great art museum just opened its new postmodern Target Wing (the retailer was a big donor) by Michael Graves, also a popular Target product designer.

I'm so glad I'm not the only one who thinks the Walker is a scowling robot. What always amused me about it is that it's scowling across the street at a church! Modern art says "Take that, religion!"

If you are really a architect buff you really need to read Devil in the White City. It's the story of the 1894 Chicago's world's fair. It has all the famous architects of the time in it (Burnham- Flatiron Building, Olmstead - Central Park, Sullivan - Frank L Wright mentor). It's quite amazing all the innovation that came out of that one event; the pledge of allegiance, AC electrical lighting, Ferris wheels, etc.

Good modern architecture is exemplified by the Sydney Opera House -- its shape is beautiful, functional, expressive, and contextual. In Minneapolis, we settle for metal-clad arbitrary shapes.

Anyone wanna take bets on how mundane and just like all the other stadiums the new Twins stadium will look?

The Walker and the Guthrie are at least attempts to galvanize the city with architecture. I find the latter more successful than the former.

the MIA, on the other hand (and the central library as well) are simply revolting buildings. The MIA actually performs the mortal sin of destroying Tange's wonderful original additon, while the library is almost ironic in it ur-minnesotan banality: squat, flat, sprawling with no center or relation to the street beyond bulk.

Yuck.

And on the Sydney Opera House...yes it's beautiful and stunning but actually the theatres inside are acoustically awful for opera (so I've been told). There's always something off with every magnificent design.

Kevin, the Twins ballpark won't aspire beyond the typical shopping mall aesthetic of most stadiums. It's not a new Soldier Field or New York Olympic Stadium.

Champs,
You're probably right. I hear the new Arizona stadium is amazing. I fear it will be mundane because it will have such a broad client base, aka fans, that trying to actually do something cool will just turn people off, so they dumb it down to the lowest common demoniantor and we get another cookie-cutter "retro" stadium. I think this proves an earlier comment that even when we get good things in Minnesota we can't help but to complain.

Incidentally, I've licked Soldier Field. It tastes fine. However, I think it looks awful from the outside. Looking up at it from the King Tut museum made me feel like an ant looking up at a cereal bowl.

I think chips makes a very good point, and it's something I've been sparring with someone recently about.

I don't understand the disdain mpls folks seem to have for saint paul. The downtown is a lot more cohesive and urbane than dt minneapolis, it just closes way way way too early. But the built environment is superior, hands down. The skyline, not so much, but at street level downtown saint paul is a much more pleasant place to be. Note how half of its downtown area is not/was not recently surface parking lots? Nice of minneapolis to tear down all its urban vitality (interesting historic anecdote: if you want to know where most of old downtown minneapolis is, it's buried under the quarry shopping centre). Shit, even the highway overpasses/viaducts in saint paul are nicer to look at and more pedestrian friendly than in minneapolis.

That said, I can't see myself living in saint paul anyway. Which is probably a part of the problem, because as attractive as the environment is, it's just really really dull at night, and it's hard to attract enough people to make it not dull when there's so little to offer them in the meantime.

So, because I have a bad habit of rambling on for too long, a summary!:

-attractive urban environs good, surface parking bad
-things to do after office hours good, urban tumbleweeds bad (consequently this is why I hate the skyway system, because nothing in it is open on weekends or after business hours, and I don't work downtown so feh to it)
-rambling on for too long not so good, summaries that become to long even worse
-trains good, cars bad (can't help myself)

I've been known to say that Minneapolis is my youth and St. Paul is my future.

My feelings on the new buildings range from quiet appreciation (Library) to open disgust (MIA) to red hot lust (Guthrie).

As for St. Paul having a better downtown, don't believe it. St. Paul has got two high quality urban spaces (Rice Park and Mears Park) which are truly top notch, but the rest of it is utterly forgettable. And St. Paul has torn down just about as many of its historical buildings as Minneapolis has.

And don't get me started on the f'n Peanuts.

I have to second chips and tmayhem's comments about DT St. Paul. Though, it is a smaller area than DT Minneapolis. Downtown does have parks like Loring, Elliot, and the River Front. They're just not in the core of DT.

While talking with coworker this week about DT Minneapolis, I made a connection that I hadn't before: the DT core is primarily a business district akin Wall St. in NYC. The financial district in NYC is pretty dead relative to the rest of the city outside of "normal business hours" - at least in my experience. Now, that doesn't explain why, say, the North Loop/Wharehouse District is pretty dead on weekend days.

Regardless, I'm very excited about the Guthrie by the River.

I'm working with a guy who's got a 2BR in the Airye condos at Galtier Plaza. If I had that place, I could stand to live in St. Paul, with a view stretching from the Capitol to the river, and Mears Park right next door.

As a fellow non-driver, I'll have to respectfully disagree with tmayhem, when he says that he hates Uptown -- depending on the context. I hate most of the bars in Uptown, I hate how you can't walk half a block in any direction without getting panhandled, and most of the shops appeal to yuppie trash. However, I love the fact that I have convenient access to necessities, bus routes, and the Greenway. Downtown is still waiting for a Partial Foods Market (since they sell so many vitamins and supplements) to open up.

When is rex going to start speaking English?