Tiny Vesper enrolls pioneers

Their college has a short history -- three years of classes, five graduates -- but for students and faculty at Minneapolis' tiny Vesper College, the mission is long-lasting, ecology- inspired architecture and permanent changes in art education.

The 18 students currently enrolled are pursuing two-year, teaching-focused MFAs in ecological architecture. That won't make them registered architects, but it will help them become teachers aware of where science, design and construction meet.

"Eco-architecture isn't a degree you can get just anywhere," said Steven Schmidgall, assistant professor at Vesper and construction administrator at BWBR Architects in St. Paul.

Schmidgall calls Vesper students pioneers: "The students are taking a little bit of a risk in taking part in a startup program like that. It's a unique program that needs to match up with unique students, with a set of skills and personalities that you don't just meet on the streets."

Recent weeks have marked a flurry of public exposure for the college and its students. The college gallery opened a monthlong juried show with guest artists. Seven Vesper students debuted a one-night artistic architecture exhibit at Art of This, the first such group showing beyond the college's gallery walls. And this weekend, student Kari Donlan opens her master of fine arts show at the college gallery.

Classes resume Sept. 9 in the college's "gentrified" 106-year-old building, which once housed Minneapolis' telephone operations and now stands as a symbol of college President Dan Noyes' vision of sustainability.

The building "has been around for 100 years -- you scrape it off, do a little cleaning and now it's ready for another 100 years," he said. "You just feel the warmth around you. You are in the earth because of the materiality around you."

The two floors of classroom and gallery space blend together, as marked by stones, sticks, ropes and metal wires and sheets that stand, branch, connect and hang from the walls and student workbenches.

Because students carry their drawings and designs all the way through construction, it's common to find computer-aided structural drawings alongside cloth webbing, feathers, piles of shells or a box of bird nests.

Student Jon Buck, 30, of Minneapolis, said he didn't often turn his designs into reality during undergraduate studies. Although Vesper could benefit from more client-connected projects, he said, the curriculum fits into his long-term goal of forming an architectural firm that does everything from design to construction.

"I had been dreaming up this idea of a college for years," said Noyes, who taught at the University of Minnesota, Augsburg College and Art Institutes of Minnesota.

His dream is to push students to connect the analytical with the artistic. It means finding "little gems by researching geology," and "running down a technical bunny hole until you find something poetic."

It also means peer-to-peer evaluations, mandatory (and social) Friday studio time for all students, courses in microclimates and a turquoise 1969 Chevy C-20 pickup truck available for students hauling raw materials.

Noyes wants 50 students enrolled in 10 years.

For now, he is focused on the gallery show, which includes 11 eco-minded artists presenting paintings, found objects and projects that blur the distinction between 2-D and 3-D.

He is also self-assessing before an accreditation visit next year, which could qualify the college for federal financial aid.

"We haven't gotten to the point where it's just going to take off and go by itself," Schmidgall said. "It still requires a lot of energy to maintain a good-sized student body."

Beata Morris, 28, of Minneapolis, was among the first five Vesper graduates. Her courses were scary in that they forced her to try new things, like cutting a hole through a house and designing a sculptural window to repair the hole.

"It's a very hands-on learning experience," Morris said. "That was the best: really knowing how to make things, how things come together."

Morris has returned to teaching interior design at the Art Institutes of Minnesota, but she thinks increasingly about what can be made from what has existed for thousands of years.

"Artists have been [thinking ecologically] all along," Noyes said. "They just need to be coaxed a little bit to emphasize the environmental aspects of their art."

Tony Gonzalez • 612-673-7415