cup o’ sugar

On Tuesday Ange Tank and I trekked to Rapson Hall at the U of M for a round table discussion on Peavey Plaza hosted by our landscape architect friend Carrie Christensen. Carrie is involved with a couple of LA organzations (HALS, MASLA) working to advocate on behalf of Peavey and its preservation as an important, historic designed space in downtown Minneapolis. Peavey Plaza's reputation has suffered over the years due to various reasons (lack of maintenance, modernism's fall from favor, etc.), and now neighboring Orchestra Hall is applying serious pressure for a complete renovation of the space. Boo to that! First of all, the space belongs to the city/the public, not OH. Second, a little foresight is all it takes to realize the plaza's future value as an iconic design artifact representing the City's massive urban renewal that went on during the late 50's through the 70's. Third, the plaza is the only public green space in that area of downtown, connecting Nicollet Mall and bookending Loring Green/Grand Rounds (the power of maps to reveal connections!).

Last year Peavey advocates' efforts yielded a designation for the plaza as a Marvel of Modernism. Current efforts focus on persuading MPLS City officials to grant it historical landmark status, which wouldn't inhibit adaptive change to the design (that's not the point, anyway), but would help ensure the process followed guidelines that would maintain the integrity of M. Paul Friedberg's original design.

I'm not a downtown girl by any means, so my experience with Peavey is extraordinarily limited...can't even say that I've ever walked through it (just past it). Still, I'm a die-hard fan of modernism (seriously, I fail to see the hard sell), especially when modernism responds sensitively to local needs/environs/culture/etc. (no, that's not an oxymoron, that's good design). I'm also a fan of public spaces like parks and plazas in general...places that bring people together, link the city to the natural world. Ben and I were recently in Mexico and visited about two dozen fabulous examples of public plazas and parks. Seeing the ways the Mexican people utilize and capitalize on their public spaces was inspiring! We saw food carts, balloon vendors, clowns, bike tricksters, capoiera, concerts, quinceañera parties, superballers (oh, wait, that was us), elderly folks, young folks, middle-aged folks...it was awesome (the power of plazas to create connections!).

Back to MPLS, here's a link to a story on Peavey Plaza on MPR from this past December.

At the event on Tuesday, Gina Bonsignore (President, MASLA) asked me and Tank to help out as we could in terms of spreading the word through our design and friend networks. So, there you have it. And now that the sun is shining a little brighter each day, it only makes sense if you are in the downtown vicinity to head over to Peavey Plaza and spend a few minutes appreciating it. Then, tell your friends to tell their friends...and that's how this works, see. Lastly, I heard something about a MPLS modernism walking tour scheduled some time in mid-May (May 16th?). As the date gets closer I'll get more info and share online. Sounds like a fun mini-staycation and a chance to appreciate our unique brand of metro cool a little more deeply.

     

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Peavey_Plaza_Modern_Marvel.zip (212 KB)

I'm in my favorite seat in the Harvest Room at the SPSC (University of Minnesota, St. Paul Campus, to provide some add'l grounding). The window wall faces the woody hillside in front of McNeal and I'm thankful for the sunshine. My chair sits beneath a portrait of Norman Borlaug, a simple plant breeder, Iowa born, U of M graduate. But just up the hill and left of McNeal sits Borlaug Hall...named for the man who was the father of the Green Revolution, the 1970 Nobel Peace Price recipient, and credited with saving over a billion lives...more than any other human in history. He did this by using scientific methods to develop high-yield and disease-resistant crops for developing nations, then personally overseeing their delivery and adoption in more than 20 countries.
I hadn't heard of Borlaug prior to coming to grad school here at the U, but apparently I'm not alone. This 10+ year old article from the Atlantic Monthly provides some good background on our region's unsung hero, and raises some interesting discussion topics at the same time. Like what about over-population? The "greenness" of chemical farming? The loss of traditional culture?
Discussion is good, but I'll defend my affinity for Borlaug for a couple of purely subjective reasons. Never having met him, I imagine him as a humble guy (part of that whole unsung thing). Plus, he's a good Norwegian, and obviously I dig that. Add to that, I just consulted the trusted info source that is Wikipedia and learned that Borlaug met his wife Margaret in Dinkytown at a coffeeshop in 1933. That's just darn cute. They were married 69 years till Margaret's passing in March of 2007.
This Spring I'm TA'ing a class that started out meeting in Borlaug Hall. Maybe it was the fact that it always feels good to vacate McNeal, or maybe the architecture of Borlaug just really is fabulous (I don't know if that's true—the interior signage certainly does suck), or maybe it is related to this idea of the power of naming...like the notion of space vs. anti-space being defined by design intent or lack thereof, an object/entity's symbolic power/meaning owing to its name (or lack thereof). Borlaug Hall feels free of pretension, full of possibilities.
I had hoped to tie these meanderings in with some other disjointed thoughts, like how great it is that the U of M now composts the vast majority of all food-related waste...right here at the SPSC there's a uniformed student agent manning the toss cans. It's another kind of Green Revolution. Borlaug's was concerned with production, ours is reduction. His was remarkably his own, ours belongs to everyone (hence the 2.0 addendum). We're all responsible in this networked interface, contributing to the pile of scraps filling those bins (or not). I like the thought of this, of being an unsung hero in a collective of unsung heroes carefully separating my plastics from my paper. Sometimes it's ok to be nameless. But I also like the thought that this space (this campus) is designed space, and the things produced here have names. It's a gentle reassurance to those of us (like me from time to time) who get to wondering whether all our academic seed-sowing will ever yield a harvest, and whether that harvest will feed anyone beyond our campus. And whose names will imbue future buildings with possibilities.

Adding a favorite by Manolo García, birdsong (I can hear them through the windows) in keeping with the nameless choir/green theme. Also posting the flyer for the CDes Greenlight group's GreenScreen events (Yes Men is worth watching).

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Pajaros De Barro.mp3 (3849 KB)

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greenscreen poster.pdf (65 KB)