The area was taped off in an attempt to keep library employees, patrons and visiting kindergarten classes from being brained by falling ice. Children's Storytime shouldn't begin with "OK, children, today's words are 'impale' and 'concussion.'"One would think that an architect, while planning the design for a building to be used by the public, would take Minnesota's climate into consideration. For six months of the year, Minnesota is covered with ice and snow. Ice and snow have a habit of falling from high places. Evidently, the architects couldn't be bothered with pragmatic things such as safety. When I worked for a law firm in the IDS skyscraper in downtown Minneapolis, I had to dodge ice plummeting from 50+ stories. I thought the idea of a thick metal awning or apron surrounding the immediate area might help prevent death by frozen debris. If an architect can figure out how much infrastructure is necessary to support a building's weight, why couldn't she or he figure out that ice will gather on their designs, and eventually come off? And come straight down? Possibly on the people who come in and out of the building you're designing? Why not include in the design something to avoid such accidents?
I've noticed that, very often, architects don't give a damn about the people coming in and out of their designs. Long gone in the mists of time is the idea that you create a building with the comfort of human beings in mind. What you have in mind instead is, "Will this design win me big shiny awards?" To hell with whether the new building alienates the public. Some designers seem to consider people to be annoying vermin, infesting their marvelous works of Art.
Take, for example, the Guthrie Theatre. Back in Michigan, I'd heard about the theatre from my f
ather, John W. Manion, who taught Humanities at Lansing Community College, including Drama and Shakespeare. My father had corresponded with Mr. Guthrie (or so I once heard), and had wanted to see the theatre some day. After my parents died and I moved here, the first thing I did was see a musical at the Guthrie. The building was light and airy, the windowed wall overlooking the Walker Sculpture Garden. The interior was white, with red carpeted lobbies gently curving around the stage , and colorful banners hanging from the high ceilings. It was open, welcoming, delightful.Idiots decided that, rather than preserving this beautiful piece of 60s Modernism, to rip it down. So much for history.
The new Guthrie is a cobalt blue canning factory, with its own "surfboard" thrusting out into mid air. Minnesota seems to have a thing for imposing metal erections jutting out from hard metal buildings.I haven't heard whether "The Endless Bridge," as the projection is called, also suffers from ice build-up. What I have heard is that, in warmer weather, the building collects spiders. Spiders love the damn thing.
The designer of the new Guthrie apparently was of that Artsy mind set that believes alienation is good. It's lobby would give Franz Kafka the heebie-jeebies. Spelunkers would love the Guthrie's long, dark, narrow tunnels. The escalator has all the charm of a cattle chute in a slaughterhouse. The atmosphere is perfect prelude to watching anything by Samuel Beckett or any of those lovely "life is a cesspool and you're in it" plays that have you wanting to slit your throat by curtain time. However, it's not a good atmosphere for watching a comedy, a musical, or something not meant to rub into your naive face that existence is cold, dark and futile.But other architects and patrons find the new Guthrie to be brilliant, impressive, innovative, worthy of top awards. It's the design that matters, not how people interacting with the design feel. People who don't like it don't understand it. Gut level reactions such as, "Holy cats, this is the ugliest place I've ever seen in my life" aren't valid, because such responses are unsophisticated.
The Walker Art Center is another example of Minnesota's affinity for large metal structures stabbing into space. Science fiction writers I know call it "The Angry Robot" (see photo). Angry Robot Face is actually an appropriate design for a Modern Art museum with exhibits such as melted plastic male organs hanging from string.This contrasts with the University of Minnesota's Weisman Art Museum, whose whimsical curves make it look like The Angry Robot with hiccups.
I don't want the new Guthrie dismantled, or designs I don't like to be censored. I want designs that challenge existing standards of taste.
What I don't like, what infuriates me, is contempt for the preservation of the past. The downtown Minneapolis library was lovely. It had (if I remember correctly) stone floors, wood trim, dark green walls, it was a calm and cozy place to study and write. And it had a Planetarium.
I've been told the library needed restoration, that there were problems with heating, lighting, and storage. Why wasn't the original building updated and restored, rather than razed and replaced? Additions could have been made to the exisiting library that probably wouldn't have cost the several million dollars of the new structure. History could have been preserved, and added to.
The original Guthrie Theatre should have been saved. It should have been incorporated with the renovated Walker Art Center. The Walker wanted theatre space anyway; why didn't they use that beautiful, unique and historic example of Modernism? Instead, there's a grassy lot for a sculpture garden where the Guthrie stood, and the Walker built a new theatre space.
It shouldn't be either/or. Buildings which are models of designs of the past should coexist with designs that challenge the previous models. What's considered in bad taste today may well be popular in the future. When I was a kid in the 60s, Victorian houses were being leveled at an alarming rate, Victoriania being considered old-fogeyish. Now people brag about their renonvated Victorian "Painted Ladies." For whatever reason, Modernism seems to be back in style. Thank heavens we have actual buildings of these periods as examples, instead of just old photos. People of all ages can learn how we came to our tastes of today by visiting and walking through environments from the past.
But whatever style architects use, I personally would appreciate it if they consider whether their Shiny Cool design might lead to my untimely death by ice chunk.
