urbanMSP

Can anyone update us on some of the projects going up in Rochester - or on the status of some of the proposals that surfaced in the last couple of years?

The Twin Cities are underlain by layers of sandstone and limestone. You can get an idea of the geology by taking a look at the cliffs on either side of the Mississippi gorge in St. Paul and to some extent in the gorge between Minneapolis and St. Paul. The University has a couple of buildings that we...

The glass that has been installed so far does help diminish the sense that the precast panels of the facade are -- precast panels with punched windows. Somehow, the glass helps the fairly ornate detailing of the panels take on more of a stone-like look and feel. The light color of the panels - which...

I suppose it's too much to hope that ESG will get really creative on this tower. This could be a serious reinforcement of the sense of the Hennepin Washington interesection really being a gateway to downtown a major point of passage on the Washington corridor. I'm surprised that CA Ventures is movin...

Not sure what to make of night time lighting scheme for the new hotel at Viking Lakes. The basic shell of the building has some interesting elements, but the finishes and now the steadily shifting purple LED patterns that pretty much cover the face of the hotel are about as Vegas as they come. For b...

In the material on the panel that studied the A,B,C ramps, I see that there is a suggestion that workforce housing could top the B ramp and that the structural framing of the three ramps makes this kind of modification possible. They envision some urban farm space and solar arrays as possibilities a...

Go for it, Lisa! This project is another ESG dip into the boring, mundane and worse. POO-POO may be too kind for this one. Sad, because this is a great location that could have taken a much more interesting project, perhaps something using the curve potential at the north end of the lot and stepping...

Thanks for the photo postings today, Matt. Were you on the Wells Fargo tower or the Capella? It really is astonishing how much these views have changed already and how much more they will be changing in the next year or two. I was out of the state from 2000 to 2011. There had been modest changes to ...

Both of these buildings are handsome artifacts of their period. We’ve lost the very best from this time, but one or both of these could be worth saving if they are handled well. Perhaps either a park or a slender new building could take over the parking lot.

It looks like this drawing is simply a demonstration of relative volumes on the property to be developed. The block representing the tower appears to be nineteen or twenty stories rather than fourteen so either the drawing is an error of the note about it being a fourteen story tower is an error. In...

“Ugly” is too kind for the Port Authority/Treasure Island proposal. This would be a colossal eye-sore. The project at the top of the page is in the same category as this beast - tasteless architecture that would be a setback for downtown St. Paul. The Mille Lacs proposal is dazzling - but perhaps, t...

It seems that the only way Alatus can pull off any project is with heavy duty subsidies. $43 million for a six story apartment building with city hall on the main floor sounds like nearly half the cost of the building. It will be interesting to see if Columbia Heights can actually get Alatus to foll...

It’s great to see the elevator cores of the Gateway project rising above ground and all the digging going on across the street at the Harlem Irving project. The worst damage of 1960’s urban renewal is finally passing away. A walk or drive down Washington towards the West Bank is astonishing and ener...

Alatus and it’s failed projects is turning out to be one of the major development disappointments of the year. After tantalizing us with two well designed projects and then apparently abandoning both, it is hard to be interested in whether they will be able to pull anything of substance off. The Ard...

Way back when the towers of Cedar Riverside were under construction, there was a utopian plan for the area that included many more of the same style of towers edging towards the River and the West Bank Campus. There was also a plan to match the single condo tower that now stands above the bend in th...

There is a lot to like here - which I find particularly surprising with ESG at the helm. There are a lot of interesting elements to this proposal, And at first it seemed odd that they were not more cohesive, but giving the different elements distinct identities and character fits the neighborhood an...

I hadn’t seen the new Thrivent headquarters for some time and was surprised to see the vertical raised mullions they’ve added to the modest tower. The addition took the building from bland, blank box to a structure with interesting texture and motion. The property looks much better and the strong ve...

Great to see some action finally happening here. Given the position of this building at the edge of the higher rise core of downtown, it will be a good transition to the 519’ across Hennepin and another good addition to the Washington streetscape. No this isn’t spectacular architecture, but it is cl...

The new hotel at Viking Lakes is topped out and rapidly getting enclosed. It’s most interesting feature is a series of two story glassed in spaces running up the north end of the hotel. They are planned to be winter garden spaces for meetings and other events. The meeting and dining spaces at ground...

The visuals for this project are disturbing. While there are two apparent extensions of existing East/West streets into the site, this hardly constitutes a continuation of the city grid. The most disturbing aspect of the drawings is the interminably long stretches of apartments/row houses? - that ru...