Lileks: Bold, brash, big building in Minneapolis? It'll never happen

The city of Minneapolis wants someone to build something on the Nicollet Hotel block. It's been a big vacant ache since 1991, when the hotel — long past its prime — was knocked down because heck, no one could ever see how that might come in handy again. No sir, not a chance anyone would want to live downtown ever in a rehabbed masterpiece of Jazz Age hostelry. Swing the big ball, boys! We've got a parking lot to make.

Don't think we'll get another squat block of indistinguishable apartments. The city wants something substantial, too: 20 stories, at least. And yes, you're hearing Chicago stifle a laugh. Oh, 20 stories? Aren't you worried people will damage their necks looking up to gawk, or people on the top floor will stagger back from the windows dizzy with vertigo? Twenty whole stories? Why, if man were meant to live that high in the sky, he'd be covered with feathers. Better equip the elevators with a good reading library, 'cause it's going to take a while to get to the top of a 20-story building.

Good point. Why not build something that will put us on the map? Why not build … the tallest building in the world?

At present the tallest building is the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. It has 163 floors and elevators so fast, with G-forces so great, the passengers hop out like toads when the doors open. If you stand on a chair and look east, you can see it. I can imagine it would be cool to live on the 163rd floor, until the moment you hear the dog scratching on the door at 3 a.m. and you shout YOU WERE JUST OUT.

But Saudi Arabia is building something even higher, the Kingdom Tower. It was originally planned to be a mile high, which is just ridiculous; the elevator operator would have to say "OK folks, 10-minute break" on the way up, and you'd get out on the 120th floor and use the bathroom and perhaps buy a souvenir.

I don't know about you, but if I worked on the 207th floor I would be constantly looking at the aquarium to make sure the water was absolutely level.

Could we go higher? Sure. At a certain point it's hard to pump concrete that high, but you can always squirt it down from satellites. Should we? Well, that question never seems to enter the minds of the super-tall building boosters; it's enough to have THE TALLEST, so they can thump their chests and say "well, America, you might have gender equality and representative democracy, but we have a guy flossing his molars on the 159th floor."

Minneapolis has four big towers — the IDS, which is beautiful; the Tall One with the Pie Plate on top; the Wells Fargo tower, a translated slab of Rockefeller Center that captures the soaring romance of the skyscraper; the crude square log that sticks out of City Center like something extruded from a Play-Doh Fun Factory. You want 30 stories of this? Fifty? Just say when.

A nice group. A handsome profile. But it needs something bigger to tie it all together. Unfortunately, building taller than the IDS is apparently the equivalent of getting loud and drunk at a party and saying, "You know what? 'The Mary Tyler Moore Show' isn't that funny. She couldn't hold a man, ever noticed that?" It just isn't done.

But say we built it. The first 60 floors would be parking, which would enable the city to eliminate every surface lot and small old ramps. Transit advocates will find this horrifying — why, unless you discourage cars, including speed bumps, narrow streets, high prices and nonlethal but painful electric shocks when they take the ticket from the ramp machine, people will continue to drive downtown.

True, but think how long it'll take to crawl down 40 stories of spiral ramp, especially if the Twins had an afternoon game. They will still be punished, and that's what counts.

Sixty floors of office space, which could be filled in an afternoon if the city and state waived all taxes to any corporation that relocated here. I mean, the mayor could hold a news conference about the controversial move, then stop to take a phone call, and say, "Well, that was Facebook. It's 100 percent rented. Next question."

If anyone's worried about overshadowing the IDS, we could design the building to look the same. Just 180 stories tall. Make the original IDS look like a mulligan, a beer frame. A cute li'l guy in the shadow of a big brother: just adorable.

Of course, it would cost a lot of money. It would take over a billion dollars, and, as we all know, if you're going to spend that kind of cash it had better be for something whose role in the community and our civic identity is an unarguable good. Like a place where thick guys meet eight times a year to move a brown, inflated object 100 yards.

Besides, we can manage the costs by selling the naming rights. VIKINGS TOWER sounds right, doesn't it? Unless they threaten to move to a tower in the suburbs if we charge them for the name. In which case, they can have the name.

In fact, here's $500 million for the privilege of calling it VIKINGS TOWER. Sure, we can cover it with purple glass.

Seat licenses on the residential commodes? You got it.