Cup o' Sugar

As a design instructor, I sometimes sound like a broken record, prodding the students to push their designs farther and farther from predictable symmetry, finding balance overall through careful placement of visual weight. Here's another teaching tool, highly personalized, and one that should get their attention: what if humans were symmetrical? EEK!

I was at Give & Take last night because I was asked to co-present on growing up in a small town. One of the people in the crowd was a girl named Kristine. I had met her last December on the church steps immediately following Andrew Bird's concert. She greeted Ben when she recognized him as the Give & Take host, and then Ben introduced her to me.

We went home then, and as I got ready for bed, I realized I had lost an earring. Always a bummer, but particularly sad this time because it was an earring I'd had since childhood, and a gift from my Grandma Helen. Black Abalone earrings she had bought for me in Mexico. I treasured those earrings, especially since she passed away about three years ago.

Cut to last night; a girl comes up to me at the event and reminds me she was the one I met outside Andrew Bird; she tells me she had really admired my earrings that night, even though she hadn't said so out loud. But that's why when she was walking to her car a few minutes later and saw one in the snow, she recognized it as mine.

She kept it since then, and brought it to me at Give & Take last night. I just want to say thanks to Kristine for noticing small details and being such a thoughtful neighbor! It made Minneapolis seem more like a small town.

Had to take TED talks off my Google page a while back because they were just taking too much of my time. This one is 17 precious minutes long, but definitely worth sitting still for: Stefan Sagmeister talks about time off as not just personally rewarding, but economically sensible, too. A few fun project overviews near the end, so don't miss them! Thanks to @wolflow for recommending.

http://www.ted.com/talks/stefan_sagmeister_the_power_of_time_off.html

Missed this boat, but I'll catch the next one. The Next Gen ONE FIX design competition was looking pretty fabulous to me...a place to submit my super rad idea for getting businesses in the East Lake Street barrio to adopt greener practices and using a design campaign to spread that message. Time ran short, though, and when my PhD exams were shifted a week later, that pretty much eliminated any time to elaborate the proposal. Will be keeping my eyes open for another possible way to bring this idea to life...and watching to see who the ONE FIX prize goes to in May. My vote goes to Community Design Group's idea for turning abandoned malls into suburban agricultural greenhouses! http://www.c-d-g.org/

http://www.metropolismag.com/nextgen/

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)