design : Featured Stories

Finding new ways to provide riders with information is ongoing at Metro Transit. Now that more people are carrying smart phones, and using them to pay for life’s essentials, Metro Transit has been innovating ways to meet riders’ needs.  

The City of St. Paul and its partners are utilizing an innovative method of managing stormwater to restore natural water systems, incorporate green infrastructure into sustainable communities and improve the urban ecosystem. 

Having an auto-oriented city comes at a cost and leaves cities in precarious financial positions, with lots of commitments but with a reduced and devalued tax base.

The St. Paul City Council has voted to allow ADUs from Emerald to Lexington avenues along University, a pilot project that will bring creative possibilities for density, affordable housing and multi-generational living to the Central Corridor.

For MSP makers, this month is among the busiest of the year as they sell their wares at holiday markets, boutiques and pop-ups happening at a crazy pace. But you can also tour a renovated machine shed and enjoy open art studios before the big freeze.    

The first portion of the Capital City Bikeway opened this month, symbolizing St. Paul’s commitment to a new, dedicated biking infrastructure downtown.

Writer and landscape architect Diane Hellekson outlines a dynamic model for thinking about cultivation of the arts in Minnesota; specifically, she makes the case for seeing the health of MSP's arts and artists in ecological rather than economic terms.

In the coming years, communities, businesses and nonprofits will increasingly look to architects for design solutions that extend well beyond buildings.  

Artspace enjoys a long history of working with culturally distinct groups in the development of affordable artist live/work housing and community spaces. From El Barrio in NY to Honolulu, HI, these projects allow artists to celebrate themselves.

The Bancroft Meridian Garden, founded in 1996 on a lot along 38th Street in South Minneapolis, began as a flower garden. But communities change. So do their gardens. Now it's a food forest for the neighborhood.

Designer David Strand looked beyond the brown asphalt shingles on a drab St. Paul foursquare and found an urban farmhouse ready for a light and airy modernization.      

A new campus renovation announced this past spring will better connect the Walker Art Center with the adjacent Minneapolis Sculpture Garden, reinvigorating a longstanding city and art center partnership.

A recently completed affordable-housing complex in the South Quarter of Minneapolis is arguably the most healthy and sustainable in the U.S.    

Makers—the artists, entrepreneurs, innovators (aren’t they all the same?) who brighten lives with their joy of creativity and aesthetic panache—highlight May’s selections. Art-A-Whirl, of course. But the MSP Maker Faire is big news, too.  

The arts real-estate nonprofit Artspace is re-scaling its work to take a more geographic approach that includes consulting with a cohort of art organizations in Detroit and developing creative districts in rural Colorado.