Univ of Minnesota, 4-27-2009
In April 2009, I traveled to Minneapolis for the national conference of the American Planning Association. I participated in three mobile workshops — getting away from the sessions held at the convention center to see real world examples of city planning in Minnesota. The best of these workshops took us to the "U" to see "adaptive reuse." The University is aggressively saving many of its older buildings, preserving the exteriors, and reusing the interiors for 21st Century college education. This is a campus I can still recognize; and while the enrollment of 51,000 students is double what it was when I attended (1950-55), I felt comfortable and quite at home. On a satellite photo of the campus (courtesy Google), I overlaid a red line to show the path of our walking tour. The slides follow that path through the campus.
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Perhaps every place yearning to be famous needs a Frank Gehry building. We didn't go into the Weisman Museum and can't judge it. But sticking this metal-clad building on the edge of an overwhelmingly brick campus relieves the drabness of the buildings along the Mall. You can see the Washington Avenue Bridge to the West Bank campus, double-decked in the 70s to encourage students to walk or bike the distance.
