It's rare to find the interior of a 50-year-old building unaltered.
Styles change, tastes change. Classic motifs from the 1920s would have looked aged and stuffy by the 1970s. The thought of a '70s interior — brown, ferns, exposed wood that gave you a splinter if you brushed up against it — might make you wince now. Ditto the mirrors and geometric shapes so popular in the '80s.
And then there's the Crystal Court in the IDS Center. Its design is over a half-century old, and it's absolutely timeless and impossible to improve. All they can do is rearrange the furniture. Which is sort of what they're doing.
If you've visited Crystal Court recently, you'll have noticed that the main floor is being overhauled — for the first time since 1998. According to Accesso, the tower's owner, the benches will be replaced by "modular boulder seating," and existing trees will be replaced by trees expected to grow much taller than the old ones — 24 feet, if all goes well.
![joel koyama•jkoyama@startribune.com 00007163a idsxxxx ] Crystal Court on a cold afternoon in the IDS Center, Minneapolis, MN.](https://arc.stimg.co/startribunemedia/YPVLILO32EO3VYFN7CJCRARHXE.jpg?&w=1080)
The fountain, installed in the late '90s, will be updated, too. Water fell 105 feet, in a sort of perpetual rain, into a basin. Some thought it was a pleasing piece of nature, magically imported into a controlled environment. Others thought it looked like the roof leaked.
Its replacement will be an infinity edge pool. Less kinetic, more restful. Whether that's a metaphor for post-pandemic downtown, we'll see. The $5 million update, which is being branded as "cosmetic," is expected to be completed by July.
An original hit
As pleasant as the new Crystal Court may be, it won't inspire the coverage the original design received. Minneapolis had nothing like it when it first opened. Not many cities did.
It was likened to the Piazza San Marco in Venice by the Christian Science Monitor's architecture critic.