A Field Guide to Urban Exploring: Architecture Edition

In the Twin Cities, we have more than our fair share of significant and amazing buildings that are open to the public, yet people rarely stop to appreciate them. Step inside and explore some of our favorites.

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Next time you’re walking through Minneapolis’s Warehouse District on your way to Target Field or to a Wolves game, stop and take a careful look around you. Not at the Target Center or Mayo Clinic Square or the Lofton Hotel. Those are fine, shiny buildings, but they’re babies compared to what’s really there.

Instead, look across the surface parking lot. The broad side of that three-story building you see facing North 6th Street? The one with the mural on its side? That’s the oldest bar in Minneapolis—a true German beer hall built by Gottlieb Gluek in 1902 as the HQ and sample room for his Northeast Minneapolis brewery. It’s been a bar the entire time—besides, of course, when it nearly burned to the ground in 1989. 

While the place is probably an afterthought to most event-goers, Minneapolis’s oldest bar matters, and not just because it still exists (though, considering the fire, that’s impressive, too). No, the Gluek’s building is an architectural diamond. Look up. That terra-cotta façade won national awards for its intricate detailing. It shouldn’t be all that surprising, as it was an early project in the partnership of architects Christopher Adam Boehme and Victor Cordella, the latter of whom cut his teeth under Cass Gilbert. Boehme and Cordella’s signature project? The Swan Turnblad residence—today, the American Swedish Institute—which they completed later that same decade.

Now spin around and consider, maybe for the first time, the towering red brick fortress just across 1st Avenue that takes up an entire half of a city block. Today we call the office building Butler Square, but when it was built in 1906 on the site of the Athletic Park baseball stadium (where the Minneapolis Millers pro baseball team played on occasion), it was the Minneapolis outpost of early mail-order catalog firm the Butler Brothers Company, the Amazon of its day.

With a horse stable in the basement, a rail spur to load and unload boxcars, mechanical freight elevators, and a core of massive Douglas fir posts and beams sourced from Aitkin, it was a masterwork of vertical warehouse design. And with its restrained yet sophisticated façade that includes trademark thin, tall windows capped with corbeled parapets, it is also a pure example of the Chicago School of architecture. That’s because, to the Chicago-based Butler brothers (Charles, George, and Edward), their Minneapolis warehouse was no disposable afterthought, which is why they tasked the esteemed Harry Wild Jones with designing it.

Officing just down the block in Minneapolis’s first skyscraper (the oldest existing building outside of New York City with more than 12 floors), the Lumber Exchange Building, Jones had a slew of major feathers in his cap, including the original pagoda-style band shell at Lake Harriet, the expansion of Lowry Hill’s Fowler Methodist Episcopal Church (now known as the Scottish Rite Temple), and a series of notable residences, including his own Tangletown abode, which he called Elmwood. 

So, while it is somewhat eyebrow-raising by today’s standards that an architect of his esteem would take on such a utilitarian project, in 1906 it was a symbol of the Butler brothers’ pride of ownership that they hired the architect who would go on to design Lakewood Cemetery’s Memorial Chapel (with its 65-foot-high dome that features intricate Italian mosaic work and 24 stained glass windows), the iconic Washburn Park Water Tower, and even the second iteration of Nicollet Park, the now-long-gone Minneapolis Millers home ballpark on East Lake Street made even more essential when the Butler Brothers Warehouse razed Athletic Park.

Over the years, as the need for vertical warehouses diminished, Jones’s grand Butler Square languished, ultimately coming within a hair of the wrecking ball before a push from preservationists landed it on the National Register of Historic Places in 1971. In 1972, the east side of the building was redeveloped into a mix of retail and office space. That renovation, coupled with a subsequent reno on the building’s west flank in 1979—both by Minneapolis-based Alliiance architects—led to the creation of the building’s most striking interior feature: a palatial, multistory public atrium that not only allows a brilliant amount of natural light into the building but also showcases the impressively hulking Douglas fir timber construction Jones employed.

People often lament that “they just don’t build them like they used to,” which is a fine thing to say but, historically, hasn’t always prevented folks from tearing down buildings built the way “they used to.” Which is why it’s a good thing the Butler bros decided to hire an architect like Harry Wild Jones for their warehouse, and Gottlieb Gluek decided to hire Boehme and Cordella for his saloon, and so many others locally hired similarly notable architects (the Cass Gilberts, Emmanuel Louis Masquerays, and Clarence H. Johnstons of the world), as the gravity of those names no doubt saved much of their work as well as historical structures nearby that are not as overtly architecturally significant.

So, next time you are in the Warehouse District—or any place like it, of which there are many, as evidenced by the stories ahead—rushing to watch Ant Man posterize some hapless NBA center or Royce Lewis hit for the cycle at Target Field, do yourself a favor and momentarily tune out all the shiny new stuff and instead focus on all of the Minneapolis of yesteryear that persists today. 

Heck, if you’re looking north up 1st Avenue along the rows of ancient warehouse buildings posing as modern offices and restaurants and you squint just right, you might even be able to make out the faint outline of horses emerging from Butler Square pulling a wagonload of mail-order deliveries. —Drew Wood

Among the Stacks

Browse books inside grand spaces that are themselves as enlightening and historic as the works they house.

By Steve Marsh

There might not be a better measure for how the Twin Cities thinks, or maybe more specifically how the Twin Cities thinks about itself, than our two central libraries. Each is a figurehead for a larger, far-branching library system, as well as a tangible representation of intangible civic virtues, as each reflects how seriously we value knowledge and how we would like the rest of the world to think about us. 

St. Paul’s Central Library, renamed George Latimer Central Library in 2014 to honor a long-serving mayor, has gracefully overlooked Rice Park from the south and the Mississippi River from the north for 108 years. Clad in ravishing, faintly pink Tennessee marble, St. Paul’s library was built upon the largesse of its wealthiest citizen—railroad magnate James J. Hill. In fact, when steel baron Andrew Carnegie, famously the benefactor of thousands of libraries across the country, was initially asked to contribute, he refused, replying through an intermediary, “The reason why he doesn’t give St. Paul a library is that J. J. Hill lives there and is fully able to provide one for the city.” 

Indeed, after more than a decade of wrangling, Hill’s gift of $700,000 (about $22 million in today’s dollars) was the impetus to build two libraries under one roof—the city’s Central Library and Hill’s personal reference library (which has sat depressingly empty since 2019). Hill selected the architect Electus D. Litchfield, a dashing New Yorker steeped in the Beaux Arts tradition, and he personally ensured Litchfield’s plans measured up to his own specifications. Hill insisted upon details like the grand staircase lined with Mankato stone columns and ceilings painted with flowers and engraved with the names of classical authors above the reading rooms. 

It nearly goes without saying that St. Paul’s Central Library was built in response to Minneapolis’s own public library—that’s how architectural development works in our tit-for-tat Twin Cities! Originally just the Minneapolis Public Library, it rose up on Hennepin and 10th in 1889. In 1961, that building was replaced by a new Minneapolis Central Library, with its mummies and its planetarium, on the current library’s site. By the end of the century, Minneapolis voters approved a $140 million replacement, to be designed by Argentine architect César Pelli. 

There was initial hand-wringing over Pelli’s ambition—his Minneapolis library would be built on the heels of Dutch starchitect Rem Koolhaas’s Seattle Central Library, perhaps the most daring realization of avant-garde architectural theory ever achieved. But all that self-conscious civic anxiety was alleviated the moment our new library opened. Enrobed in humble but gorgeous Minnesota-quarried limestone, and with a great winged roof strafing every surface with twinkling daylight, Pelli’s creation achieved the perfect aesthetic synthesis of imagination and function. Step inside the soaring atrium, follow the cantilevered staircase up to one of the various reading rooms, and find a spot to read, either in a comfy chair in front of one of the fireplaces or with your elbows resting on a sturdy table—you can feel Minneapolis getting smarter. George Latimer Central Library, 90 W. 4th St., St. Paul; Minneapolis Central Library, 300 Nicollet Mall, Mpls.

3 More to Explore

Pierre Bottineau Library

Minneapolis renovated Grain Belt Brewery’s 1893 Wagon Shed and 1913 Millright Shop, incorporating the two structures into a new 12,000-square-foot library. Transforming beer into books is true Nordeast alchemy and should be celebrated. 55 NE Broadway St., Mpls. 

St. Anthony Park Library

One of three Carnegie libraries built in Minnesota in 1916–17 (the other two are Arlington Hills and Riverview), with its elegant arched windows and cheery children’s reading room, it is a testament to what a library can mean to a community. 2245 Como Ave., St. Paul

Walter Library

Designed by Clarence H. Johnston, Walter is a Beaux Arts masterpiece with a red brick façade, limestone trim, and a colonnaded portico. Its interior, with ornate plaster ceilings, gold leaf gilding, and 225 owl engravings, evokes wisdom and knowledge. 117 SE Pleasant St., Mpls.

Cornerstone: Cass Gilbert

Minnesota’s most famous architect was born in Ohio and moved to St. Paul as a 9-year-old in 1868. His surveyor father died young, so his mother raised him and his brothers in a small house by herself. Gilbert studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and went on a grand tour of Europe before landing a job at McKim, Mead and White in New York. He returned home to a fast-growing St. Paul and began designing homes, office buildings, and churches for an influential local clientele. He was commissioned to build our third state capitol in 1895, and the success of that project launched him into architectural immortality—he went on to design Manhattan’s Woolworth Building and the Supreme Court Building in Washington, D.C. —Steve Marsh

(UN)Common Spaces

When the most masterful part of a building is the part just inside the front door, all you have to do is open it and walk in.

By Dara Moskowitz Grumdahl

A building doesn’t have to be designed to withstand attack by men in armor to be architecturally formidable—a castle. Consider, for instance, Minneapolis’s IDS Center and St. Paul’s Landmark Center. 

Why? Largely because of their iconic atriums or—as the Italian masters referred to such open, public spaces within a structure surrounded by arcades—“cortiles.” The IDS and the Landmark Center both have glass atop their tops—to keep out the elements, obviously, but also for the light and magic.

Planned and budgeted for in 1891 as part of our Minnesota federal everything—courthouse, post office, custom house, and anything else a newish state might need from a rich federal government—no expense was spared with the Landmark Center. Go see for yourself. Swoon over the glassy geometry of classically oriented, Italian Renaissance–ish skylights in the five-story cortile. Oh, all that marble! Oh, all that carved mahogany! If you’ve watched The Gilded Age and wondered why we can’t live with buildings like those—you’ve clearly never stood in the Landmark Center.

Blocky, shiny, stripy—both architecturally gorgeous and problematic—the IDS, built around the same time the Landmark Center was spared, is the tallest building in either of our downtowns and, much to the chagrin of the late Wilbur B. Foshay, the singular object that defines our skyline. From some angles it looks like the center of the Emerald City, while from others, it is stark. But it’s best viewed from inside the eight-story cortile known as the Crystal Court. It’s the greatest tower designed by Philip Johnson, that confounding Nazi sympathizer who built the IDS hand in hand with Jewish Minnesota architect Ed Baker. Johnson was one of the most important architects of the 20th century, famed particularly for his 1949 Connecticut Glass House, which was basically a rectangular glass box for living, with reimagined walls, ceilings, light, privacy, heat, clutter—all of it. The IDS is Johnson’s Glass House realized in city-defining scale. 

Standing in the IDS cortile, you feel like a facet in a gem thanks to the jagged, angular glass ceiling above and the glassy water of the atrium’s reflecting pool of a fountain. Gaze up from the skyways, or from the Crystal Court, to see what the architects called “zogs” (the term for the intricate step-back design that makes the tower sparkle and change in the light and also allows for a generous 32 corner offices per floor). Facets, facets, facets; glass, glass, glass; light, light, light! 

Can a tower be a castle, can a castle be a beast, are we royals, and is this kind of luxe just made for us? The answers can only be found if you go and see for yourself. Landmark Center, 75 W. 5th St., St. Paul; IDS Center, 80 S. 8th St., Mpls.

Great Architecture—for a Drink?

Union Depot

St. Paul’s version of New York’s Grand Central Station is a temple of neoclassical elegance—and a great place to test your art-history trivia. Which ones are Corinthian columns, and what’s a Guastavino vault again? Grab a table on the old waiting room marble floors, now part of the lounge at 1881 by Lake Elmo Inn. Order from its cocktail program, look over your drink, imagine Union Depot as Minnesota’s gateway to the whole wider world, which it still is, and buzzy thanks to the new daily Borealis to Chicago. Trains, the once and future glory? We’ll toast to that. 214 E. 4th St., St. Paul

Wells Fargo Center

The grand César Pelli–designed tower with its circular atrium is fun to amble around because of the vitrines housing Wells Fargo’s significant design collection. Pair your visit with a stop at one of the Rand Tower’s bars or restaurants. Merely a few steps away through the skyway, Blondette, with its glassed roof, is impossibly glamorous, and Miaou Miaou is the chicest possible cocktail spot. 90 S. 7th St., Mpls.

Milwaukee Road Depot

Railroads built Minneapolis, specifically the railroads that carried grain in and flour out. While much of this history is long gone, the old Milwaukee Road Depot persists, now as the Renaissance Minneapolis Hotel, The Depot. The tracks have been removed from the grand, Renaissance revival arrival-and-departure platform and have been replaced with regularly scheduled arrivals of barrel-aged Manhattans and Wagyu sirloins from the Milwaukee Road bar. 225 3rd Ave. S., Mpls.

Civic Duty: A Tale of Two City Halls

Cities are nothing if not crucibles for myth and lore. Take Rome, for instance, founded by Romulus and Remus, who were abandoned and nursed by wolves. Take London, with its ravens, towers, crowns, and queens. Newer cities like Minneapolis and St. Paul, meanwhile, had to work to create the myth and lore that we didn’t inherit, and like any set of twins, they’ve taken different approaches. Report to the circa-1932 St. Paul City Hall lobby to see a beautiful myth drawn from a pan-Native, art deco fantasy world. Carl Milles’s soaring Mexican white onyx fellow in a jet-black and amber glittering room, Vision of Peace, is loopy, ahistorical, and magnificent, in equal measure, but that’s what myth is for! Meanwhile, Minneapolis City Hall went in a classical direction with the Poseidon-like, Carrara marble Father of Waters, sculpted from a 44-ton block of marble by Larkin Goldsmith Mead, which is the centerpiece of the building’s five-story rotunda. —Dara Moskowitz Grumdahl

In Eternal Reverence

Explore architectural marvels that are as close to heaven as the gods they are designed to worship.

By Steve Marsh

There are very few rooms in Minnesota that transcend human scale. Rooms where the ceilings are suspended so high above, and every surface is so intricately appointed with sculpted marble, stained glass, and filigreed gold, that you completely lose perspective on just what it took to construct them in the first place. Sitting in a pew inside The Basilica of Saint Mary or the Cathedral of Saint Paul, even the most sober-minded engineer will find it difficult to think of mortal measures like hours or dollars spent and instead be forced to confront the ancient and the holy. Which was exactly the ambition of the two very human dudes responsible for building both sacred spaces: Archbishop John Ireland and his trusted architect, Emmanuel Louis Masqueray.

It feels appropriate that the architectural era when they lived is now known as the Heroic Age. Both Ireland and Masqueray were immigrants, born and educated in the old world. But Ireland first encountered Masqueray’s work in the new one, at the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904, where Masqueray had relied upon his training at Paris’s prestigious École des Beaux-Arts, and his experience building homes for American elites like the Vanderbilts, to oversee the construction of the fair’s palace, colonnade, monuments, and landscapes. 

Over the next decade, Ireland would commission more than a dozen projects from Masqueray—chapels, churches, and a school in addition to the basilica and cathedral—which would transform Minnesota’s architectural landscape. Masqueray wanted the cathedral to be “entirely of the 20th century in feeling and purpose” yet with “charm to the old churches of the Middle Ages.” He structured it classically, like a modified Greek cross, with a short nave and wide transepts. When you look up at it from the hill, its massive copper dome, 306 feet from the ground, appears even higher. Inside, 25 varieties of marble dance under the jeweled light of massive rose windows. 

And while this cathedral rose, Ireland had already commissioned Masqueray for a second, to be built on swampland just west of downtown Minneapolis. Masqueray laid out what would, over a decade later, be christened The Basilica of Saint Mary by Pope Pius XI like a Roman cross but without transepts. He used more modern construction techniques, mostly steel and concrete, with five sets of pillars supporting five girders, on which hangs an interior of painted plaster. The Basilica’s copper dome was somewhat smaller than St. Paul’s cathedral, and Masqueray exchanged St. Paul’s dour gray Rockville granite for lighter, whiter Vermont granite for its exterior walls.  

The archbishop and his architect were alive for the first mass at each of their cathedrals—1914 for The Basilica and 1915 for the Cathedral of Saint Paul—but not much beyond. Masqueray collapsed on a St. Paul streetcar in 1917 at the age of 55, and Ireland passed on a year later at the age of 80. The interior decorations of both of their monumental churches were finished decades after they were gone and have been remodeled and refurbished many times over within the century since—but perhaps this is what they expected, working on a scale of space and time beyond the ken of humanity. The Basilica of Saint Mary, 88 N. 17th St., Mpls.; Cathedral of Saint Paul, 239 Selby Ave., St. Paul

3 More to Explore

Hindu Temple of Minnesota

Rising out of a cornfield, it was constructed according to the Indian principles of Vaastu Shastra, architectural guidelines meant to bring health, wealth, and peace. The 43,000-square-foot temple has a 45-foot-tall gopuram at the entrance and 21 ornate shrines honoring sacred representations of God within. 10530 Troy Lane N., Maple Grove 

Temple Israel

Designed by Jack Liebenberg, the first Jewish architect in Minnesota, the 1928 neoclassical revival building has a chapel dedicated to the beloved Rabbi Samuel Deinard. The temple’s five doors represent the five books of the Torah, and the 12 columns in the sanctuary signify the 12 tribes of Israel. 2323 Fremont Ave. S., Mpls.

Christ Church Lutheran

Eliel Saarinen’s south Minneapolis masterpiece, Christ Church Lutheran, with its serene composition of light, wood, brick, and stone, was constructed in 1949. In the 1960s, the church commissioned his son, Eero, now famous for St. Louis’s Gateway Arch, to design an education building complementary to his father’s work. 3244 34th Ave. S., Mpls.

Cornerstone: Léon Eugène Arnal

He was born in Mouret, France, in 1881, and studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in both Marseilles and Paris before coming to America to work as an assistant to architecture professor Paul Philippe Cret at the University of Pennsylvania. After returning to France to serve in the army during the Great War, Arnal moved to Minnesota to take a position as chief designer at the firm of Magney and Tusler. He designed three landmarks that embody architectural elegance: the Woman’s Club Building (1927), the Foshay Tower (1929), and Minneapolis’s Main Post Office (1933, now renamed Martin Olav Sabo Post Office). Arnal served as a professor of architecture at the University of Minnesota from 1919 until 1948. —Steve Marsh

Arts Magnifiques

Walk among masterpieces (or sit in a theater to watch them) in buildings that are as masterful as the work they feature.

By Dara Moskowitz Grumdahl

Museums are how a city tells the world who it really is, and their entrances are where the biggest statements are made. Think about the glass pyramid in front of the Renaissance majesty of the Louvre or the iconic neoclassical façade fronting New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. 

In Minnesota, we started telling the world who we really are at a dinner in the winter of 1911, when DeWitt Clinton Morrison, the finance-bigwig son of Minneapolis’s first mayor, said something to the tune of, “If you can raise half a million dollars for a museum, you can build it on my parents’ estate.” By 1915, McKim, Mead and White—the architects of the Washington Square Arch in New York, The New York Public Library, and The Rhode Island State House, not to mention much of the Harvard and Columbia University campuses—dug into what would become the neoclassical gem that is the Minneapolis Institute of Art. This was a time when Minneapolis took a seat at the table during the age of empire, before the upheavals and wars of the 20th century. New York, Paris, Boston, Rome—meet the world’s newest deep-pocketed and serious player, Minneapolis.

Back then, you would head up the grand stairs and through the heavy doors of the original 1915 front entrance on East 24th Street, now rarely used, and you would be immediately in the heartbeat of the museum. Nowadays, at Mia’s main entrance on 3rd Avenue—the one that connects it to the Children’s Theatre—you’ll find a 314,000-square-foot, early 1970s expansion designed by Pritzker Prize–winning Japanese architect Kenzō Tange, primarily known for rebuilding his Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park and Museum.

This main entrance leads to a grand hall with an open three-story staircase and floor-to-ceiling windows framing the view of downtown. This is Minneapolis in its Hubert Humphrey and Walter Mondale era: We’re leaders in global peace, and we believe in a modernism that unites nature, community, east, and west with art. The Mia expansion is Tange’s most important work outside of Japan and a touching testament to an idealistic time in our civic life.  

The next time you’re at Mia, take a few moments to look not only at what’s on the walls but at the walls themselves, as well as the ceilings, doors, and floors. Mia is Minneapolis telling the world: “We are a global design player, we have power, and we also have fun.” 2400 3rd Ave. S., Mpls.

3 More to Explore

The Guthrie

Most theaters aren’t particularly theatrical, usually summoning classical antiquity or the Italian Renaissance.  “Theatrical” isn’t easy. How can the same space serve historical tragedies, modernist work, and bawdy comedies? Jean Nouvel’s answer at the Guthrie was to use light and soaring space winningly. 818 S. 2nd St., Mpls.

The Walker

The best vestibule in the Twin Cities has got to be the 2016 Ferrari-yellow aluminum box that local architects HGA installed at the Walker that leads to the sculpture garden and main building. As you walk through, it feels momentous, meaningful, but also sleek and elegant—a neat architectural trick and a vestibule worth talking about. 725 Vineland Pl., Mpls.

The Weisman

When Frank Gehry’s Weisman was unveiled in 1993, it made him a bona fide starchitect. Though he’s known for avant-garde spaces like the Guggenheim in Bilbao, Spain, and the Museum of Pop Culture in Seattle, none of them hold a candle to the Weisman viewed from the Washington Avenue Bridge at sunset, when you can witness what The New York Times compared to seeing mercury for the first time. 333 East River Rd., Mpls.

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