The last weekend in January, I attended a few offerings in a Climate Solutions Series during the Great Northern Festival. Halifax, Nova Scotia-based Architect Omar Gandhi presented some of his work and discussed sustainable architecture, indigenous input into design and architecture specific to northern climates. An example: a beach house with roof that follows the topography so as to offer little resistance to the sweeping winds.
An aside that caught my attention: He was saddened by the loss of our iconic Nye’s Restaurant building…having visited before and coming again to find out that it is gone.
That same weekend, two architects from Berlin who are working on the Midway Contemporary Arts building at 1509 Marshall St. NE presented a film, soon to be released, that will be used to gather support for a petition in Europe. They want to stop the demolition of buildings and interrupt a system where housing and land have become financial tools. Their firm, b+, specializes in adaptive reuse of structures that others would throw away. Read more at http://bplus.xyz/
Demolition throws away the embodied energy and resources that went into making a building. The cost of renovation usually outweighs the cost of demolishing plus building new simply because that embodied energy/resource cost and the social/environmental costs of landfilling are not factored in; in their opinion they should be. Rising interest rates and other market factors have temporarily slowed the apartment building boom in Minneapolis, perhaps giving us time to reflect on the balance between density, environment and other considerations.
It’s been more than a year since some of us from the Arts District got together a group of artists and architects to see what we have in common and how we might work together. From that discussion, it was obvious the throwing up of cookie cutter-designed new buildings and the tossing away of history concerned almost all of us. Watch this space for the link to the European campaign when it launches.
Note that Midway Contemporary Arts anticipates being done with construction by mid-May. We will feature their project next month in the Arts District News.
By Margo Ashmore