Unnerving: Recognizing the Fake War Zone

So, I get that movie producers often use real places to set the scene for their film. However, when the movie is about kids living in "a war ravaged neighborhood," it's weird when you recognize the place.

Apparently, Riverside Plaza -- a cluster of high-rise apartment buildings near downtown Minneapolis -- is the setting for "Ana's Playground", a film made by students at Augsburg College, which is right next to the apartments. The brutalist buildings themselves are distinct -- although some of the structures are bland concrete, most of them are clad in colorful paneling that screams "this happened in the 1970s!"

The apartments were built as mixed-income buildings, but the reality never matched the dream. If I remember correctly from a presentation I've heard on the complex, Ralph Rapson (head of the U of M architecture school from 1954-84 and designer of the old Guthrie, RIP) hoped it would be a catalyst for social change in the area, where white-collar workers could live alongside new immigrants, and frolic among the fountains and eat in restaurants below. However, even though they were supposedly where Minneapolis' fictional Mary Tyler Moore lived, they never really attracted the white-collar workers, and they quickly became not a city solution, but part of the problem. In the end, only about a fifth of Rapson's entire plan was built. The fountains don't work. Locally, some people call them the Crack Stacks, because they're known for some unsavory behavior.

However, they're also home to a lot of Augsburg students and a large Somali community. And, while they are pretty gaudy on the MPLS skyline, they speak to the era in which they were built. However, to put them in another context — a post-war context — caused me to look at them with a whole new lens. Scrolling through the film stills, I recognize what I remember from visiting Lviv, Ukraine, where the communist-built structures encroached on the Austro-Hungarian center-city. It felt foreboding, depressing. Ugh. Really — there was this feeling of utter despair, and that's the feeling the filmmakers give to Riverside.

I guess they accomplished what they wanted, but it sure doesn't help the neighborhood's image in my mind.

The beginning

Ahh, how to start a blog. It seems as momentous — and as daunting — as the white, unwrinkled page in a new leather journal, just without the benefit of a pencil eraser. What I put here, they tell me, will last forever.

Well, so be it.

As a budding architectural historian and a newspaper reporter, I’m intrigued with the concept of a “Sense of Place.” Any writer worth his ink will tell you it’s foundational to a good feature story. And any historian — architectural or otherwise – knows that the context of an event (or building) gives it its meaning. Without place, it’s nothing.

As a Catholic, place takes on an entirely different level of meaning. The absurdly prolific Catholic writer G.K. Chesterton wrote, “I have become a pilgrim to cure myself of being an exile,” which speaks to the human condition, as understood as Christians. It is heaven, not this life, which is our destination. However, because the Catholic faith is incarnational, we believe that the things of this world have profound meaning. Thus, place — in an actual, material sense — is essential. That’s why, historically, Catholic churches have been beautiful, well-crafted and well-positioned structures.

I intend this blog to address Place in these three manners: the physical, as in buildings and city planning; the metaphysical, as in the atmosphere that one associates with physical places (what is often called “a sense of place”); and the spiritual, which transcends the senses though it is perceived, and speaks to the larger questions in which we often ascribe “place-like” metaphors, which as “Where are going?” and “What is home?”

This thing isn’t intended to be too heady, but it I hope it is interdisciplinary.

Welcome to Place + Meaning.