Design : Development News

The next wave of development will usher out the era of manufacturing in downtown Minneapolis. If all goes well with Hunt Associates' purchase of Merit Printing in the Warehouse District, a residential tower will one day rise where a lowly, one-story printing plant now stands.

"We are the last manufacturing firm in the downtown area," says Ron Boerboom, co-owner of Merit Printing, which has outgrown its longtime home and is looking for a new site, either in Minneapolis or an inner-ring suburb. "I'm sure the city would like to see us out of here," Boerboom adds; trucks backing up to loading dock doors create congestion on the street.

But the modest structure at the corner of Second Street and First Avenue North is known for more than occasional impediments to traffic. For more than 15 years, the company has hosted one of the largest and most celebrated mural walls in Minneapolis.

Sometimes called a legal graffiti wall, Merit Printing's ever-changing mural started with the full sanction of the city, a project of the Minneapolis Youth Coordinating Board. Within a few years, YCB handed off the wall to Juxtaposition Arts, the North Minneapolis hip-hop art school. Since then, Juxtaposition has completely repainted the long wall on the building's First Avenue side every year or so.

"It's a good thing," says Boerboom. "It put Merit on the map." He often sees people stop to take pictures and fashion shoots take place in the company parking lot "on a weekly basis."

Source: Ron Boerboom, Merit Printing
Writer: Chris Steller

The Minneapolis Farmers' Market on the outskirts of downtown is already a seasonal sensation, a place where the chance to jostle with other shoppers past 240 stalls of flowers and food is guaranteed most summer mornings.
 
Now the adjoining Farmers' Market Annex, where crowds spill over to shop at 160 more vendor stalls, has turned a little-used parking lot and storage area into a showplace for home landscape and garden services called Urban Garden.
 
Owner Scott Barriball compares Urban Garden to a permanent home and garden show in a farmers' market setting--a sort of outdoor version of the nearby International Market Square design showplace. The offerings range from pergolas, fire pits, and bubbling boulders to handmade willow furniture, birdhouses, and tomato trellises.
 
Barriball says the equivalent of close to $1 million in labor and materials went into the creation of Urban Garden, transforming a site he says used to be "an underutilized mess." Vendors and contractors tore out blacktop and built landscaping attractions that include three outdoor kitchens, two waterfalls, and a rain garden.
 
Barriball's Annex is a for-profit counterpart to the nonprofit Farmers' Market operated by the Central Minnesota Vegetable Growers Association. Together they lay claim to having the largest selection of any market in the Upper Midwest, with an atmosphere like a European bazaar, drawing as many as 25,000 people daily.
 
Source: Scott Barriball, Minneapolis Farmers Market Annex
Writer: Chris Steller
 

A group of designers who call themselves the What!Worx Collaboration have won a design competition for artist housing on Minneapolis' North Side by taking a collage approach -- both to the design and to how they worked.

That's appropriate, because the Bearden Place townhouses are meant to honor 20th-century artist Romare Bearden, who used collage to depict and comment on contemporary life, particularly for African-Americans.

The competition, sponsored by the City of Minneapolis and the Builders Association of the Twin Cities, was also a way to stir up ideas for regenerating neighborhoods hit hard by the foreclosure crisis (pdf).

The site, at Sheridan and Plymouth avenues, is in the Willard-Hay neighborhood, one of two in Minneapolis still seeing foreclosures in double digits each month. Citywide, the foreclosure rate fell in 2009 but has been creeping up again this year. City government has been battling back on a number of fronts � including the Bearden Place design competition.

Ira A. Keer, an interior architect, started What!Worx in 2007 with other design professionals from major firms who found themselves on their own as the recession took hold in their industries. "Our combined portfolios opened doors," Keer says. The group's ad-hoc business structure could respond flexibly as opportunities arose.

What!Worx's Tim Heitman, a graphic and environmental designer, said the team's 1,600-square-foot live/work spaces (pdf) were among the most generous of the 38 submitted designs. The exteriors, Heitman says, have a color collage's "sense of articulation and individuality."

Negotiations to build the project are underway.

Source: Ira A. Keer, Tim Heitman, What!Worx Collaborative Design
Writer: Chris Steller