This story on the Minneapolis building boom notes that it's mostly residential. That seems telling. Usually you have a boom downtown, it's office space - but now most of the construction is for living, not working. This isn't unusual; the big new towers in NY and Chicago are residential as well. The 4th biggest project of the top five: The Soo Line Building. I wonder whether the lobby will have any historical information for tenants, or just pretend the building's previous life didn't matter. In case you're curious, this stood on the site over a hundred years ago:
It was around for less than a decade. The occupant, the First National Bank, was feeling its oazt - and up went this.
A nice exmple of the old "Filedrawer" school of design. The reason we don't have another like this? New York got an example so enormous they changed the zoning laws to make sure buildings tapered at the top instead of going straight up for a mile, and blocking everyone's sunlight. Those zoning ordinances changed the way New York architects designed skyscrapers, and that changed the styles for everyone else.
Anyway, the FirstBank / Soo It stands today, and that's what they're making into apartments. As for that "Soo Line" name, a vestige of the signage was visible into the late 1990s, when I took this videocam grab:
Here's a 1950s shot of the old bank lobby, fro the StarTribune archives: Probably never occurred to those folk it would all be apartments upstairs some day.
Think of that the next time you go into the IDS. Apartments by 2065? Impossible! Or not.
POP CULTURE This hit the web today: seven whole seconds of shooting. Why are people excited about this?
It's Bioshock Infinite, that's why. As i understand it, the game has nothing to do with Bioshock 1 or 2, inasmuch as it takes place in a city in the clouds in the "Steampunk" era (how I hate that term), not a city underwater in the post-war era. But the term "Bioshock," applied to games, now implies a philosophical undergirding, a contest of ideas that gives the shoot-'em-up festival some intellectual heft. The first game played out in an Ayn Rand-inspired city; the second turned it upside down and made Altruism the corrupting idea. From what I gather, "Infinite" goes political - yay! More of that everywhere! - and pits nativist Optimates, to borrow a phrase from the Roman times, against radical egalitarians. Immigration might be an issue, although the idea of a "border fence" really seems moot when your civilization is floating several thousand feet over the surface of the earth.
