Design : Featured Stories

Across America, creative reuse organizations are popping up to "upcycle" and sell stuff that would otherwise end up in a landfill. Artisans and artists are, in turn, turning this would-be detritus into artworks and products.

Three about-to-open brewpubs and a new facility for a well established fourth are turning the Central Corridor area in Saint Paul and Minneapolis into the newest brewpub hot zone. And the architecture is as ambitous as the beer.

Get ready for some changes in our already-stellar park system that will expand your ideas about recreation, ecology, and economic development.

On Saturday night, lensman Bill Kelley braved the threat of another downpour to take some lively shots of Secret City, Minneapolis' answer to the Northern Spark alfresco arts festival, which was based solely in St Paul this year.  Check out his images of Aztec dance, djs, fire performance, sound art, and a huge inflatable civic mood ring called MIMMI.

With Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) a possible future option for areas of Minneapolis and Saint Paul where light rail isn't feasible, I decided to take ride on Apple Valley's newly opened BRT route (the Red Line) to check it out. And why not? I'd already checked into a suburban hotel after the power went out at home.

"If urban planning is musical composition, then placemaking is improvisational street performance." Five tested tips for doing the much-talked-about, rarely defined, improvisational, street-level, people-oriented form of urban design that's rapidly replacing the old top-down paradigm in the Twin Cities and across the country.

Your editor helps run a meditative labyrinth-walking project amid the cheerful madness of the Northern Spark one-night, all-night arts festival--and points out another cool artfest that's ongoing.

For artist/gallerist Pete Driessen and the theater artists of Off-Leash Area, turning their garages into art spaces provided opportunities for innovation, experimentation, and freedom, very close to home. And the neighbors don't mind a bit.

The May Day Parade and Festival is our Mardi Gras--a heartfelt explosion of color, music, art, fun, and earth-friendliness after the weariness of long winters. Bill Kelley caught the parade action last Sunday in the Powderhorn neighborhood as Minneapolitans dressed up and rocked out to say goodbye to the cold.

Monday, May 6, The Line and its civic partners kick off a weeklong Placemaking Residency with urbanist and placemaker Katherine Loflin, who knows why we love (or don't love) our cities.

Architect Daniel Yudchitz decided to design and build a small, sustainable, low-cost, energy-efficient house for himself in Saint Paul's challenged Rondo neighborhood, to demonstrate how architecture could promote urban reinvestment. And then the banks weighed in.

Consolidating its position as a laboratory for cutting-edge design thinking, the University of Minnesota's College of Design hosted the first Public Interest Design Week. Its climax was an awards show that displayed ingenious design-driven solutions to the dilemmas of poverty and ill health in America and around the world.

Art lives in the Twin Cities--and not just in the tonier parts of town. Thanks to initiatives like Twin Cities LISC's Building Sustainable Communities program, art and artists are taking major roles in helping some of our most challenged inner-city communities thrive.

This week: Get in gear (or jump on your fixie) for what ARTCRANK, our high-powered local (and national and international) poster collective, touts as "the biggest bike-art shindig ever thrown," this Saturday.