From Bauhaus to our student housing

The North Star Center skyway in the glowering light of an afternoon storm. The bright band of western sky is reflected off the canted facade of the Thrivent building, and in the far distance you can see the crown of Rapson's Cedar Square West housing on the West Bank...a fading monument to the last wave of urban hubris in that area. Rapson studied under Mies van der Rohe in Chicago, after Mies fled Germany. The daffy colored panels pasted onto the mausoleum-evoking concrete housing hive have faded, the building is almost past repair. I rented a bay in Rapson's studio on Seven Corners in the late 70s, and did some of my best comix there. Ralph watched me draw for a while one day, then said "all comix are self portraits" and went back to his drafting table.

Much of downtown modernism owes its impassive glitter plane geometry to principles of Bauhaus architectural theory. You will never see an American City influenced by Gaudi, for example. How did the coy reflective austerity of surface seize hold of the American urban imagination so thoroughly, in such a short time?

The skyway is a horizontal skyscraper in miniature. A sky tickler, laid down between sessions of hilarity.