Chicago has long been the unofficial capital of modern architecture in the U.S. But the Twin Cities certainly have opportunities to compete in the noblest art. With high-profile expansions and demolitions underway (the hammer always comes with a claw), there’s been a small parade of internationally known architects arriving here with plans tubed underarm. It’s a fine thing to live in a city where there is sufficient vanity and money to indulge in an ambitious new Guthrie Theater, an expanded Walker Art Center, a face-lift for the Children’s Theater, an augmentation for the M.I.A., and a reconceived public library.
Unfortunately for these kinds of projects in this part of the world, it’s often an exercise in dilettantism. When steering committees propose new buildings, the same short list of trendy architects ends up on the back of the envelope. For a while there, it seemed as if Frank Gehry was the golden goose, to the point where his grocery lists were winning local admiration. Let’s remember I.M. Pei too, who essentially pasted a “kick me” sign on an entire city’s rear-end with that cheap tiara atop the U.S. Bank building. (One can only hope that the same people who removed the original Guthrie’s pretentious façade are looking up in the sky with wrecking balls in their eyes. If we’ve learned anything here it’s that architecture is emphatically not a permanent art form. Architecture in the Twin Cities is slightly less archival than a typical black and white photograph.) Now, of course, Michael Graves is in fashion. Ephemeral times call for finite artists. There is nothing inherently wrong with an architect who spends much of his time designing can openers and toilet plungers.
Even when they reach for real historical continuity and solidity, city planners manage to make decisions that are as predictable as they are dubious. Consider the bloated and precious “Frank Lloyd Wright” bridge, recently finished on Third Avenue over I-94. Given the Twin Cities’ tradition of vainglorious bridge-building, it came as no surprise that city guardians wanted to build something special for the “Avenue of the Arts” initiative. (If the lakes of Minneapolis ever revert to swampland, we could justly change our epithet to “the City of Bridges.”) But lots of eyebrows went up when Minneapolis announced that it was commissioning the first Frank Lloyd Wright bridge ever to be built. Eye brows twisted further when Minneapolis revealed that this would actually be a Wright-inspired bridge. Now that it’s done, Minneapolis realizes that no Wright bridge has ever been built for the simple reason that Wright’s bridge designs are, by and large, some of the ugliest, uninspired drawings the man ever put on paper.
Our impulse to make inspired buildings and bridges is admirable. But we are plagued by our own limitations. When it comes to public building projects, no one seems capable of thinking past a few one-syllable surnames. Most of the public is well aware of Frank Lloyd Wright, and vaguely conscious of his importance in the canon of middle-American architecture. Some have actually made the effort to seek out what remains of his overrated portfolio—such as the wholly unremarkable gas station in Cloquet, which is unique in the same way as the new Third Avenue Bridge; its unsightliness is rare indeed.
It’s one thing to commission a world-class architect, and quite another to commission a world-class building. But to reanimate the dead is the most unnatural and unnecessary trick of all.
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