COLLEGE OF ARCHITECTURE AND LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE

Commencement Address

Rip Rapson,

President, The McKnight Foundation

May 13, 2000

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INTRODUCTION

Thank you, Dean Fisher.

I’m deeply honored to be here with you today. It’s exciting to witness the excellence reflected in the preceding awards, the talent for wicked insight embodied in Meg, and the promise for the profession that lies within each of you graduates.

My ties to this college are longstanding and very personal. I attended my first CALA lecture when I was three, given by Frank Lloyd Wright at Northrop Auditorium shortly after my father had taken over the deanship from Roy Jones. Over the next 30 years of my father’s tenure, I watched an extraordinary institution change with the times, grow in influence, and produce the bedrock of this state’s design community. And for the five years before coming to McKnight, I was proud to be a part of this College, spending the bulk of my time trying to figure out exactly what Bill Morrish’s drawings really mean.

But I am not an architect or landscape architect, and so I propose to talk with you this afternoon from the perspective of someone whose law practice focused on the design professions, whose service in the mayor’s office sought to raise issues of design to a higher level of public attention, and whose academic career was spent exploring the intersection of physical planning, design, and public policy. In my nine months at the McKnight Foundation, I have found myself, once again, wrestling with difficult public issues that are rooted in urban and regional design.

I’ve come to the view that it is impossible to overstate the consequence of urban design at this point in history—not just in our own metropolitan area, but in every metropolitan area in the country. As Dean Fisher recently wrote in an insightful article for the Star Tribune, “Design has shifted from a marginal pursuit to something central to the economic life of the community and the quality of life of families.”

If you have doubts, scan local newspaper headlines. Public controversies over affordable housing, safety, sprawl, light rail transit, neighborhood revitalization, loss of farmland, racial and economic segregation, and threats to greenspaces and waterways. All involve crucial design decisions that will impact millions of people and—to a large extent—determine our future quality of life. We either design wisely now or lose—there will be no second chances. If we don’t, the economic vitality that helps give Minnesota its budget surpluses and the reputation for livability that we currently enjoy will both be in jeopardy.

I would like to touch on three things today that I hope will help you think about these challenges seriously and in a slightly different way. First, with a nod to my father, I'd like to lay out 10 principles of design in the public realm. Second, I’d like to touch on some of the key design opportunities on our local horizon. And third, I’m going to take the great risk of offering you three pieces of advice as you move from the academic world into the world of practice.

I. 10 PRINCIPLES OF DESIGN IN THE PUBLIC REALM

In 1960’s, my father developed a statement of design philosophy he called the 10 Commandments of Architectural Design. At the risk of blasphemy – and I’m sure my father would consider it such – I’d like to suggest a list of ten principles that reflect the particular demands of design in the public realm.

First, public design must be concerned with “setting the question.” Design is a contemplative, problem-solving discipline, calling upon us to question the way we view the world. The act of contemplation and problem-solving is, in turn, rooted in asking questions – clearly, early, and frequently. Questions like the two Bill Morrish and Catherine Brown framed for neighborhoods in their book Planning to Stay: what is it about this place that draws us here? What could we add to this place that will keep us? These are the kind of questions that help you, your client, and your community inventory what you have, compare it with what you want, and plan for how to get there. They are the kind of questions that expand choices and improve decisions.

Second, public design should be about context and connectivity, not about creating discrete objects. It is as much a process as a product—a process concerned with relationships, frameworks, and holism. In the Twin Cities, we have demonstrated considerable skill in designing attractive, functional objects—buildings, parks, and bridges. What we have done less well is to make them add up. Public design is about creating a shared experience, not an isolated one. It is self-defeating to build highrise housing for new immigrants in Brooklyn Center if those families are isolated from transit, essential social services, and cultural amenities. It accomplishes little to create imaginative light rail stations if we fail to tie them into the neighborhood through traffic planning, lighting, and other forms of connective tissue. The parts must reinforce one another and contribute to a cohesive whole.

Third, public design should be focused on adding value, not simply on meeting the bottom-line. Designers in the public realm are accountable not only to their clients, but also to themselves and to the citizens who will live with and interact with their work for decades to come. That means that in addition to considering the economic imperatives that drive projects, designers must be conscious of the human needs and values implicit in those projects. Weak design may seem the cheapest route, but in the long run it can often exact great social and economic costs to communities.

Fourth, public design must take its bearings from the natural environment. The Twin Cities identity has been shaped powerfully by its lakes, creeks, river, and greenspaces. They must be protected and enhanced as the heart of the city’s visual heritage. Creating corridors of linkage between the river and our neighborhoods rather than stringing out public and private projects that block public access to the river’s edge. Reclaiming streams, wetlands, and other ecological systems rather than paving, ignoring, or otherwise engineering them with the inevitable consequences of unstable footings, flooded basements, or contaminated soils.

Fifth, public design must seek out the links to our heritage. Cities are created over time, layer upon layer, in a way that distills the experiences, symbols, and civic values of succeeding generations. As we rush to create anew, we fail to realize that ripping through these layers does violence to the past. Buildings come down for many reasons, but often because we have failed to ask the kinds of questions I referred to earlier. The history of the Twin Cities is replete with examples of buildings or districts whose loss took with them part of our collective soul.

Designers have a pivotal role to play in cultivating a public preservation ethic. In this morning’s paper, the Minnesota Preservation Alliance listed the state’s 10 most threatened historic resources. Wouldn’t it be great if five years from now we could look back and see that graduates in this class a played a significant role in removing all ten from endangered status through imaginative preservation and reuse.

Sixth, public design must ennoble the daily routine of our citizens. In a globalized, homogenized world of McMansions and Walmarts-are-Us, design makes possible the expression of the particular, the idiosyncratic, the local.  It sets the stage for public life, defining how our streets, parks, and commercial centers meet the needs of citizens. It affects the way people move through the city. It can either encourage or discourage human interaction and civic engagement. How comfortable we feel in our environment is tied directly to the extent to which our buildings impart a sense of human scale, our landscape architecture provides surprises and variety, and our streets invite activity. I doubt that many of you aspire to a career in street design. But somebody out there could do more good than ten Michael Graves’ if she would dedicate the early years of a design career to convincing county road engineers that repaving projects can be done in a way that does not obliterate the potential to both accommodate car traffic and serve as pedestrian byways.

Seventh, public design must integrate disciplines. Urban planning by its nature and complexity demands input from many fields of study—architecture, landscape architecture, ecology, sociology, engineering, art, physics, communications, political science, geography, geology…the list goes on. Projects like the design of a Light Rail Transit system need to take into consideration not only the efficiency, integrity, and durability of the system, but how it can enhance community building, how it can integrate the arts, how it can help get workers—not just shoppers and travelers—where they need to go, and ultimately, how it can help equalize access across the Twin Cities to our recreational and cultural assets.

Eighth, public design must recognize interests and issues that cross neighborhood and city boundaries. Increasingly, regional issues have an impact on the quality of life for Twin Cities residents. For instance, employment opportunities located in outer ring suburbs and worker populations located in inner cities - combined with inadequate public transportation - has helped create a regional labor shortage that exceeds the capacity of any one municipality to solve. Similarly, we must face the question of how we can provide well-planned, well-designed housing throughout the region that is affordable to the low-wage, entry level worker on which so much of the new economy depends. Designers must not capitulate when the marketplace contends that these questions are too difficult to address or the politicians assert that they are too controversial. They must instead spur us to work outside our normal categories, to move toward integration not fragmentation.

Ninth, public design must take risks. Public architecture and landscape architecture are at their worst when they mimic yesterday’s hot trend. Not everything needs to be invented anew—postmodernism has offered up plenty of examples of skillful reuse of past themes and approaches. But the design process should strive for freshness that responds to and embraces today’s dizzying flux of techniques, materials, and socio/economic circumstances. Let the banks and large development companies play it safe—the architectural solid waste of aging malls, big-box retail establishments, and suburban track housing are their legacy. Designers in the public realm can help us understand that we have options that will better serve our collective needs and more effectively stand the test of time.

Tenth, public design must be engaged in public policy. It’s simply not possible to adhere, even slightly, to these first nine commandments without immersing yourselves in messy and often controversial issues of public policy. I have been asked dozens of times over the last few years whether I could recommend architects and landscape architects who could contribute to public policy conversations: everything from revising local landuse regulations to drafting federal legal mandates, from advising neighborhood groups to testifying before legislative hearings. And as I think of the ambitious, important public work that Todd Rhoades has done in assisting East Grand Forks create a post-flood plan, that Lance Neckar has done in helping Minneapolis plan for the light rail corridor along Hiawatha Avenue, that Bob Sykes has done in helping pilot water quality cooperatives throughout the state, or that Bill Morrish has done in shaping a subregional agenda for a coalition of post-war suburban communities, I am reminded that day-in and day-out your efforts push and pull our public policy environment in exciting, important directions.

II.  KEY LOCAL OPPORTUNITIES

Having outlined these 10 principles, I’d like to talk a minute about a handful of local projects where they will certainly come into play. Let me use McKnight’s funding areas as illustrations.

First, the arts. We, at McKnight, have recently been, or will soon likely be, asked to support a staggering array of cultural building projects: Penumbra Theater on University Avenue, the Open Book on Washington, the Walker Art Center expansion, the Jungle Theater expansion, a performing arts space in Loring Park, an orchestral amphitheater, a new University studio arts complex, the relocated Schubert Theater. The list goes on. Form may follow function, but each of these raises complex design questions of site, scale, connectivity, preservation, public value.

One example. I’m sure all of you are aware of the Guthrie Theater’s recent decision to relocate along the Minneapolis riverfront. As sorry as I will be to see the building my father designed demolished, I appreciate what a tremendous public design opportunity this move represents for our community. The excitement inherent in this project lies less, I dare say, with the likelihood of an award-winning theater on the river – as exciting as that may be – than with the transformative possibilities of linking disparate elements along the river to form a vibrant downtown community. From the Stone Arch Bridge to the new literary complex at the Open Book building, from the residential projects in old flour buildings to the Mill Ruins historical museum, from the planned archeological park to the Milwaukee Depot restoration—we have a once in a lifetime chance to reassert the connection between housing, commercial activity, the arts, and the natural beauty of the river that gave birth to our city 150 years ago.

Second, the environment is equally rich in opportunity. McKnight’s environmental program is largely dedicated to the preservation and enhancement of the Mississippi River. To be sure, a substantial portion of our efforts is dedicated to water quality improvements, grassroots organizing, and bluffland protection. But we have engaged in an equally substantial body of work that calls on designers in various capacities. For example, we have help bring to life a series of river museums from the St. Anthony Falls Interpretive Center to the St. Paul Science Museum, from the Dubuque River Museum to other smaller centers for public education. We have sought to encourage a chain of river reclamation projects that include public art parks, riverside greenways, and other urban space rehabilitation all up and down the river. This blending of architecture, landscape architecture, and environmental enhancement is one of the most important things, in my mind, that our foundation does. I hope that some of your might join us in this work some day.

A third area in which design is poised to make enormous contributions in the Twin Cities is regional planning, development, and growth. McKnight has traditionally seen the core cities as the physical, social, and economic epicenter of the larger region. The world has become more complex, however, as edge development pushes the region ever-outward and the plight of inner-ring suburban communities comes increasingly to resemble that of center cities. The design challenges posed by sprawl require little explanation: an entire cottage industry has sprouted up in conjunction with New Urbanism, Neotraditional Town Planning, Transit-Oriented Design, and other similar efforts. But the challenges of older, first-ring suburbs are equally compelling and arguably far more complex. Bill Morrish and his colleagues at the Design Center have done pioneering work in calling attention to the fact that the postwar suburb in many ways represents the next generation of urban policy challenges, with all the attendant issues of design and planning. Not yet a cottage industry, but certainly a growth industry if there ever was one: rehabilitation of aging housing stock, redirection of obsolete commercial and transit corridors, reclamation of natural systems, reconceptualization of town centers, and countless other opportunities for imaginative, policy-driven design. It is a prime example of how designers can help us better understand our interrelatedness and build neighborhood, community, and regional cohesion.

This doesn’t begin to capture the kinds of opportunities you might embrace as designers in the public realm. These and countless others promise dramatically to improve not only the appearance of our buildings, communities, and landscapes, but the very quality of our lives. And, wherever you practice, teach, or otherwise apply your training, each one of you will be part of that kind of influence.

III.  THREE PIECES OF ADVICE

I may not be a designer, but I’ve been immersed in design long enough to have made some observations based on my father’s career experiences as well as my own. As you move from the classroom and studio to the office, I want to share three caveats with you today—each illustrated with a bit of my father’s history.

First, beware of experts. Experts can guide you, challenge you, widen your perspective, introduce new information, offer suggestions based on their specialized knowledge—but let their expertise help give voice to your own creativity, not stifle it. Sir Tyrone Guthrie, all six-foot-eight of him, was as formidable a client as you can imagine. From the minute my father was hired as architect for the new theatre in 1960, Guthrie made it clear that his knowledge of theater was so deep that an architect need only serve as a draftsman to execute his design ideas. My father made it just as clear that he would bring to bear his own abilities of synthesis in translating Guthrie’s needs into physical form. This tension persisted right through the new theater’s opening night. If he had simply obeyed Guthrie’s directions and not pushed back, we would never have seen the pioneering asymmetry of the inside house or the multicolored seats or the abstract geometry of the original facade. The best results will always be a healthy hybrid of your client’s expertise and your own. Never hesitate to fight an “expert’s” bad idea.

Second, beware of conventional wisdom. There are plenty of people in the world who will tell you something can’t be done. Don’t believe it. Throughout his entire professional life, my father was told repeatedly that it was impossible to both practice and teach—let alone head a school and a significant architectural office. The advice was probably sensible—certainly nobody at the time was striking this balance successfully. But my father tried it anyway, and managed it for decades. To this day, he claims achieving that balance was one of the most satisfying accomplishments of his life. My advice would be, strike your own balance, not somebody else’s. Listen to conventional wisdom, but also recognize that many groundbreaking achievements were made by ignoring it.

Third, beware of the path of least resistance. The design process is heavy with complex and subtle negotiations. Many of those take place in a grey area where compromise is the best solution; others are black and white. When my father was hired to serve as the architectural adviser to the U.S. Postal Service, they asked him to approve the design for a 6-story parking structure on the Minneapolis riverfront. Not in the business of erecting walls along the river, my father suggested that they instead put it underground. When they came back to him with a compromise – a 4-story ramp - my father took out his very sharp #2 pencil, drew a very heavy x through the ramp on the final construction documents, and asked if they needed him to be more clear. Needless to say, they didn’t come back, and the Postmaster relieved him of his duties. I’m not suggesting that you destroy your clients’ working drawings, but I do urge you to be very clear about your fundamental professional principles and never to abandon them.

Armed with ten design principles, three cautionary tales, and the enormous gift of an education at this extraordinary institution, you will, I am quite certain, thrive. Please go forward and do just that. We need you desperately. Good luck!

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