Rolled out like a welcome mat before the Vikings' new stadium, the three-block "Commons" is the most important open space project in downtown Minneapolis in generations.
Reaching from 5th Avenue S. to the stadium's front door, the Commons is envisioned by the oversight committee as a hybrid of public land ownership and private administration, a "premier destination that draws users from around the world" and a park that "serves as a retreat for the community" — all to be privately reserved for the Vikings and the Minnesota Sports Facilities Authority (MSFA) up to 100 days a year. Few parks can be all these things.
Expected to be announced in January is a design team chosen from an international field of talented competitors. In the media and through public meetings, it's a good time to discuss the future of Downtown East.
These five points about the Commons' design and management should be addressed to ensure that this development fulfills its potential for the entire metro and not just as a semiprivate events space:
1. The Commons is not just another park: It's an outdoor room for the city.
The Commons is the largest open space built in downtown Minneapolis since Loring Park in the late 19th century. Unlike Loring, the Commons is not a pastoral greensward but a great urban outdoor room. We have nothing like this in Minneapolis: a gathering space big enough for huge events where the surrounding walls of architecture set the backdrop. When first conceived, this project was called "The Yard" — and that was a good name. Historically, the word "yard" implied a safe enclosure within a city or village such as a courtyard or a churchyard — and not some big piece of open green space. This is a city square and not a work of environmental art.
2. Avoid designer clutter.
Some worry that the Commons runs the danger of just being a big, barren space. I fear just the opposite may happen, once the stadium and the even taller pair of Wells Fargo towers are completed to the east. The stadium will dominate this space and visually foreshorten its three-block length. This big city room can get small really fast. Let's not clutter it up with clever stuff that some designers love to add — such as custom bollards and lights, winter ice fountains that eventually break, flowing earthworks evoking the drumlins of Minnesota prairies, and permanent walls and fences — no matter how artistic they seem.
Let's preserve key vistas from within the Commons to the civic art that we already have. These landmarks include the art deco Strutwear building, the Grain Exchange and the Amory — one of the finest New Deal buildings in the country and a promised, though as yet undefined, part of this project. Let's call for well-scaled spaces, long-lived trees, and easy-to-maintain materials for long-term durability and ease of repair. The design needs to include a 50-year management plan that addresses turf maintenance, tree care and eventual replacement, paving and irrigation. Such plans did not exist for the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden and Peavey Plaza — both of which have become overgrown and visibly rundown. Think of the Commons as civic space that will become historic — a smaller version of the Mall in Washington, D.C., where a broad lawn down the center doubles as the nation's living room for inaugurations, rock concerts, protests and casual soccer games. The Mall works so well because its design is so basic.
