James Lileks responds to a fellow Strib-writer’s defense of a brutal, Corbusier-inspired 1970s concrete apartment tower in Minneapolis:
If I’m a detractor, it’s because this complex embodies everything wrong with utopian urban planning. The author calls it “vibrant,” a word you always find associated with neighborhoods that have an edge (my old DC neighborhood was called “vibrant” as well as “romantically multicultural,” two terms I saw in an Amtrak magazine story a few days after the riots of ’91), but explain how living on the 38th floor contributes to street-level vibrancy. It doesn’t. You want vibrant, you want community, you want people to care, build ‘em low and make them look like they’re part of the long historical – dare I say classic – vocabulary of residential housing.
We once knew this instinctively, prior to the arrival of Corbusier and the Bauhaus. But then, they don’t call it the Great Relearning for nothing.
Minneapolis is very underrated. Were it on either coast, it would be widely regarded as a cool, and yes, vibrant city. But those Soviet-style concrete apartment buildings by the river (assuming Lileks is talking about the same ones that yours truly is thinking of) are pretty bad. Incidentally, they supposedly house lots of Somalians — many of whom are said to be of questionable character (again, assuming Lileks’ buildings are the same ones I’m thinking of).