Well, the moon takes the skyway, doesn't it?

In case you are wondering about the strange energies today, the full Moon is the closest it gets to Earth every 29 years or so. Called the perigee full Moon, it is about 13% brighter and larger than the apogee full Moon, when it is at the farthest point in its orbit.

USBank Plaza Abstraction with flock of granite

Just as I snapped this a very polite guard said no pictures were allowed. I explained that I was waiting for permission to take photos in the atrium and was just doing some studies for a larger format camera. The guard wished me luck.
This is a view of Loren Madsen's "Birds in Flight" sculpture. It was created in 1981 of 276 suspended granite blocks, polished on the bottom and rough on top. It fits the triangular theme of the entire magnificent 8 story atrium. The wires look like a new wave harp, and it would be interesting to have contact mikes picking up live vibes from the unique instrument.

Find your SO on the skyways?

Ctrl+Alt+Repeat from Architecture Minnesota on Vimeo.

A "product concept" that has to happen...social media app that lets you know someone who has read Freud but won't stalk you is coming down the TCF feeder into your zone, and you guys can duck into Dunn Bros with an introduction courtesy of  the cyber yenta. How you do on a first date chaperoned by the zillion speed walkers skywaying by is not affected by technology, dude.

When Britt Aamodt interviewed the skyway habitues for her KFAI documentary, one of the first questions she asked was about dating on the skyways.  It seemed possible, without the meat market ambiance of local bars, the group concurred. I am a senior citizen and happily married, but I couldn't do justice to the skyways without acknowledging the libidinous frisson that characterizes urban passage.  I acknowledge it, and amble on.

As I am typing this, "Bones" is on in the other room.  There was an episode a couple of years back that hinged on a smartphone app for locating other members of a dating service who were within a dozen yards or so of you.  The zeitgeist demands that this product get made, and helps a generation of iPad heatseekers and seekerettes find their SOs in the skyways.

See this video and 23 other Videotect skyway contest entries here.

As far from Minnesota as you can get and still be on the skyways

Dan Yudchitz and Aaron Squadroni from Architecture Minnesota on Vimeo.

Dan Yudchitz and Aaron Squadroni have listened to electronic experimental music and studied extreme graphic design deconstructivism. They benefitted from it as few people do then went and produced an edgy AND upbeat piece that is hardcore formal exploration AND affect-laden interpretive video.

I recognize many spaces here, and I have moved through them myself.  They reflect me, and ultimately our skyways, in ways it would be hard to talk about at the Chatterbox Cafe. Very creative and also an exploration of the innate formalism that almost makes the skyways unbearable, in a bearable way.  Enjoy.

A video interpretation of the way of the skyways...

Jeff Beddow from Architecture Minnesota on Vimeo.
This is my entry in the skyway video contest sponsored by AIA Minnesota magazine. It is a distillation of a year's worth of photographing the skyways, soundtracked by some electroacoustic ocean sonar riffs.  The skyways are a trip.  It takes a lot of left and right brain to get your head around them.

You can go here to vote for it, or something else you like.  But if you think the skyways are a cut above the norm, or a floor above the street, check out these videos and vote.

Coming and Going -- Qwest Women sponsor a craft sale today

Anisha Dunne, with Grass Lake Pottery, shows off her custom design.

Ann Johnson, with Annies Home Made Mixes, restrains her enthusiastic lawn ornaments.
These ladies are selling their wares on the corner of the Qwest building arcade as you head through the 5th Street Skyway. They are there today and next Friday. Unique pottery and lawn ornament designs, great prices, check it out.

Vested interest in Girl Scout cookies

It's that time of year again. Like Robins on the lawn, girl scouts in the skyways herald the coming of spring This accomplished young lady shows off her merit vest, her mother, and her hand written sign in the pursuit of support for her Scout troop. Karen and Nikki, Troop 11450, 501 Marquette Skyway level, St. Patrick's Day, 2011.

The old Lady poses for her portrait

Happened to catch the light just right walking across the 3rd Ave. skyway this morning. I am scouting vantage points to shoot the best of the old buildings downtown with my view camera, and this is a study for that project.
Municipal Building, Minneapolis.

Cub Foods Gas Main fire from Downtown Minneapolis

Around 8:40 this morning, from the 18th floor of the Government Center. There was no news yet of the source or location. It looked like the fuse of the world had been lit.

5 comments on 5 Videotect entries

Here in no particular order are my comments on some of the Videotect Skyway Video entries.
In brief, the premise is to present a point of view about skyways, and in particular their relationship to the streets, in a 2 to 4 minute video.  The contest was launched at the end of last year, and all entries are posted on the Architecture Minnesota Vimeo site.

I entered a video myself, and believe myself to be mature and objective enough to respond to the entries without too much crazy self-absorbed obvious flaming egotistical bias.  My interest, here and elsewhere, is to encourage and stimulate a conversation about the whole phenomenom of skyways, in particular the Minneapolis System.

1. Adam Ferrari

Adam Ferrari from Architecture Minnesota on Vimeo.

Adam has selected and illustrated a very clear argument from Jane Jacobs. To my view, Jacobs represents a valid if somewhat archaic vision of cities as bad rural communities, different in density but not in essential human character. She doesn't see much hope for American cities, based as they are on convenience, shallow status display, and simplistic planning goals that maximize the prerogatives of indifference and exploitation. I think someone needs to pull the patches out of Jacob's quilt and resew it into a pattern that can accommodate the simultaneity of optic fiber and Glee reruns, the collapse of the American Federal model of global conquest, and the resurgence of chastity among urban teens. If that seems murky to you, you can understand why I didn't try to gloss Jacobs in my video.

Recommended. Well, all the videos are recommended. You can watch the whole group in an hour, give or take.

2. Dustin Rehkamp and Matt Gerstner


Dustin Rehkamp and Matt Gerstner from Architecture Minnesota on Vimeo.

This video starts with a Chris Marker feel,evoking La Jetee, using the skyways as a metaphor for the unconscious psychic geometries that keep us isolated in the urban landscape. The ending is a goof. I like the "husky" business guy and the winsome gal. It is an O Henry story told in the idiom of YouTube.

3. IDE[A]


IDE[A] from Architecture Minnesota on Vimeo.

A deconstruction of the experience of movement through the skyway, achieved with fluent manipulation of the plasticity of video time and space. It feels like a distracted conversation, with glances away, lulls, a pleasant background. The time flow stutters and spirals around, the spatial flow bunches up and skips, like sparse lunch crowds in the skyways themselves. This is very slick, sophisticated use of the medium and will impress everyone. For me it captures the skyways as kaleidoscope: fragmented but symmetrical, gem-like in their rough urban setting, too abstract to inspire fondness but earnest enough to admire. The skyways, I mean.

4. Sammy Sarzoza


Sammy Sarzoza from Architecture Minnesota on Vimeo.

This video has actually earned a few "likes" on Vimeo, which is unusual for this set of videos. Maybe over time some others will garner this onsite approval. The soundtrack sets a bouncy, retro, drive-in movie concession break mood. You have to like it, really. The message is simplistic to the point of loony irony without spoiling the enjoyment of the entire package. It will grow on you.

5. Alan Polk


Alan Polk from Architecture Minnesota on Vimeo.

Readers of this blog have already encountered Alan in his role as inventive skyway videographer. I have to confess a bias in favor of anyone who can strap a Sony to a Unicycle and push it through the maze. More to the point, Alan is the first to directly oppose the rural to the urban, and pry out the outlandishness of building walkways in the sky contrasted to the down to earth sentiments of a "real" Minnesotan. If the protagonist was forking silage, I would say Alan had created a straw man argument here. But he has done better than that, he has seen the skyways through the eyes of Lake Woebegone, and found them wanting.

Skyway detail

Most of the skyways...well, actually all of them, are fairly severe in their design and finish. I have made reference to the doo-dad school of design which results in a few post-modern jollities affixed to the otherwise dour face of the skyways. But they are not a rollicking lot. They do not party-on dude. The blandness of their visible structures, the flat industrial finishes and minimal patterning of their carpets contribute to the disorientation most people feel from one skyway to the next. Add to that the inability to see landmarks from most skyways, and the tendency to be completely disoriented is almost complete to newcomers.

I suspect that that is really a strong subtext in the lack of affection we feel for these modest footpaths stapled as afterthoughts to most of our harum-scarum city architecture.

Why do I like them more all the time? I don't know. I like difficult teachers and I like convoluted stories. I like discovering new things in the familiar, and familiar things in the new. I have grown to distrust sheer spectacle, and have grown to depend upon the dependable, not the brilliant, for getting from day to day.

So maybe it takes more than an open eye to see the skyways in their true virtue. Maybe it takes an overlay of imagination that sees mischief and possibility where there is really only practical response to a harsh enviornment.

Maybe it takes more than eyes to see the virtue of Minneapolis. Maybe it takes imagination to see a possible life here, and many happy accidents to make one so.

In Caelum ego, Et in Arcadia Ego

"In the sky I am, and in paradise I am also"...a paraphrase of Poussin's famous painting title.
"I am death, and I am of the sky today."
Gravestones, black bird, and moon in the branches of a tree at Lakewood Cemetary, Minneapolis. The spirits, the birds and the moon really invented the skyways of all cultures. Our spirits imagine flight in our dreams, and we speak of departed spirits flying. The birds know the intricate subtleties of the way of the sky. The moon defines the counterpoint to day and night in the month-long cycles that give rise to mood and tide alike. But do we really know the skyway? Do our jumbo jets and space shuttles give us command of the skys? Do we walk through the skies as habitants, or as dreamers only?

Today the skies are ribboned with the faint pulse of radioactivity from Japan, and the keening grief of thousands of victims slashes the wind above the battered island. Modern technology and ancient ambitions collide. In the cemetary it all comes to the same end.

But from the place where it all ends, we lift up our eyes and see new beginnings. It is a cycle, not a straight path. That is the true way of the skyway.

Speaking of breathtaking atriums downtown

The Hennepin County Government Center was built in 1974 by John Carl Warneke and Associates. He had designed the Honolulu State House and the JFK Memorial. Warneke had a grand vision of the gravitas of government, and wanted the new county court house to hold its own with Long and Kees spectacular City Hall/Courthouse across 5th Street. He also wanted it to be the anchor point in a civic square which in turn reestablished a focus for the whole downtown area...a focus once imagined in the early years of the 20th century but was lost to the vicissitudes of aimless development.

The interior of the court house has a 350 foot high ceiling, which was the highest in the Western Hemisphere when it was built. The building is comprised of two towers joined by a set of magnificent glass panes that are 13' on a side, and which had to be custom made and then completely redone when the seals on the double panes didn't stand up to the extremes of Minnesota weather.

These days we can look back on the ambition of local politicians to house their doings in a setting that recalls the grandeur of great governments, great dreams. I watch people scurry through the Public Service Level, their heads bent and eyes glued to their phones, and wonder if we will ever elevate the practice of government to such levels implied by this magnificent atrium. I hope so. I bet my life and career on the prospect of a civil service that was in fact a noble calling, not a mean one, and not a calling at odds with the very citizenship that it serves.

Militant fountains in the Government Center

These three fountains were not meant to symbolize munitions, actually. They were meant to symbolize the industry and agriculture on which this area's economic foundations were built. But they ended up looking like big steampunk squirt guns anyway. The fountain is beautiful

City's shortest skyway contest continued

If your ears are at the entrance to the city's shortest skyway, your nose is at the exit. This runty passage runs north from the Fifth Street Towers to the Title building.

Looking East from the stubby skyway above, you see its counterpart a block away. Somehow a bit longer. No contest.

Masonic Temple details, symbolism

Masonic Joys

Masonic Building, Minneapolis. March, 2011

I just shot this 4x5 photo yesterday. I was having a low week at work, and decided that packing the view camera down to 6th and Hennepin and doing the Masonic Building would cheer me up. The whole kit, including a vintage Minolta lightmeter, 4 film packs, monorail Calumet 4x5 View camera on a 26" rail, etc fit pretty well into a big shoulder bag. With tripod I was lugging 20+ pounds, and I had a 12 block round-trip through the skyways. I think that coming back into the system through the Plymouth Building might have put me in a node I hadn't actually visited before.

When I went out to set up on the sidewalk, I realized I hadn't worn a jacket and it was about 38 degrees. I fought the urge to rush the set-up, and had to go under the dark cloth several times to recheck the focus. The corner I was on was good for attracting attention from groups of street kids, but they just wanted me to take their picture. No real hassles. When I had the front and rear tilts and front lift set on the camera, I realized the battery had gone dead in the spotmeter, so I had to guess the exposure. That wasn't too hard. The lens and shutter I was using was an uncoated 140mm f4.5 Kodak Anastigmat in an 1930s vintage Compur shutter, which I had to trust for timing in the cold. This was a 50th of a second exposure at f16 on Ilford Delta 100 film. I took another at a 10th of a second which I intended to underdevelop, but forgot and it came out way too dense to print.

I tray developed the two exposures I made, one at a time. This print shows that I over-agitated the negative, but I have to say that sitting in the complete darkness at 3 a.m. listening to the motor on the old Gray Lab timer and gently rocking the enamel pan back and forth was a spiritual moment for me. Total focus and total defocus, pardon the expressions, simultaneously. I had to be completely in the moment because my only clue that the timer was up was the sudden silence of the motor, which was only as loud as a cricket walking through straw in the first place. But, while my senses were acutely tuned to the chirring sound, and my wrist was flexing slowly enough to not slosh developer on my drawing board, I felt an immense peace, a completion of my sense of self that rarely occurs.

People wonder why I go to this trouble to take a large format photo that my Nikon D90 could do as well or better, they think. With so much less trouble.

The photo is just the package of the experience, and the experience is a distillation of years of being and hours of effort. The package has its discipline, the experience has its shape and meaning, the whole arc results in a few moments of pure joy that cannot be secured through any shortcuts I know.

So how do you like the "vintage" look? Seems appropriate for the old building.

Japan today live

Live streaming video by Ustream

The web is a skyway at times like these.

The way of the seashell

Skyways are rectilinear. Seashells are spirals. The lack of gradient in the skyways is felt as a kind of shock, your path jerks every block, jogs left or right, jams into a t-intersection, shifts up or staggers and staggers around a bit before shooting off into another tee or ell. There is not chance for the inner ear to find a melody to your path in the skyway. It has a certain rhythm. But no melody.