Xcel Energy HQ - 401 Nicollet

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FISHMANPET
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Re: Xcel Energy HQ - 401 Nicollet

Postby FISHMANPET » October 30th, 2015, 9:49 am

Except there are objective facts that can be used to debunk those other things.

Riding a bike with no street is objectively more dangerous, here are the statistics to prove it.

Areas with no transit that require driving everywhere are worse for people with low incomes, and bad for the environment, here are statistics to prove it.

Bland buildings with "poor quality materials" (what does that even mean?) are bad because ???

Here's the thing, I don't necessarily disagree with you on the building. But in all these other "fandoms" (ugh no that's just disgusting). Sorry, when the rest of us are advocating for better transportation, we're not just sitting in a room together saying "aw shucks I wish we had a subway." "Yeah a subway would be cool wanna ride our fixies to the bar now?" No, there's lots of reading, lots of research, lots of writing, lots of political advocacy. We're working to make a change. If you wanna sit in your mid century modern ranch house and talk about how great a building is before slamming down a PBR, then fine, do it, whatever. But don't compare what you do to what we do if you just wanna shit in and say "it stinks!" and not really want to engage with that idea or try and convince anyone of it (when repeatedly asked to especially).

And I don't think it's fair to say we don't see value in blah blah blah. That's never been what this is about. What I (and others) want is simple. An objective explanation of what is wrong with this building/ Maybe that's not possible. Fine! Say that! It's not that I don't believe you that this is bland, I want you to explain it, and specifically explain it in a way that can be used to prevent other bland buildings in the future. Because I do see a value in non-bland buildings! But if we have literally no way of preventing them besides complaining about them once they're built, then we're pretty screwed, aren't we?

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Re: Xcel Energy HQ - 401 Nicollet

Postby helsinki » October 30th, 2015, 9:53 am

Nathan, I agree - this building would have been immeasurably more appealing if it were clad in brick and stone. There is a childish plasticity to the pre-cast that is a bit repellent. At the same time, most passers-by will notice the other people coming and going from this building (and the means by which they do so), rather than the beauty of the exterior materials. By activating the corner, the building upgrades what had been a dreary part of the mall (even despite the presence of the library kitty corner). For me, that is a good thing. Extending your analogy - it is like taking a street with no bike land and adding a striped land that ends before the intersection; imperfect (a protected lane would be superior), but clearly better than no designated space for cyclists at all. I want quantum leaps in the built environment too - but I won't condemn baby steps either.

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Re: Xcel Energy HQ - 401 Nicollet

Postby Nathan » October 30th, 2015, 10:03 am

FMP you know i care about all those things, I'm just trying to give you basic examples of why i think some "objectivity" is important.

I never condemned this building, I called it what it was, a bland single use building, that will only have people coming in and out at 9 and 5, built with materials that I feel aren't of quality up to par with what Nicollet mall is striving to be. And people keep coming at me with its fine, and that's also not a good enough argument to me. You all know there is better, I don't care how you want to measure it.

The city had advocated for better materials on a lot of projects not even on the mall, so I can't see why they wouldn't here.

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Re: Xcel Energy HQ - 401 Nicollet

Postby FISHMANPET » October 30th, 2015, 10:04 am

There's a greater imperative to get buildings "right" though, because a building will last much longer than any transportation improvement, short of a tunnel maybe. A bad bike line can be restriped. Even a too wide ROW can be rebuilt in the normal process of road maintenance. I guess a building can be reclad, so maybe we can fix the good to become great.

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Re: Xcel Energy HQ - 401 Nicollet

Postby MinnMonkey » October 30th, 2015, 10:10 am

I like how the block turned out. Of course, I'm not an expert in materials, but I like how it looks.

Image4Marq and Xcel Energy HQ Minneapolis 10-29-15 by Matt Bappe, on Flickr
Wow! Compare that to just a couple years ago:

https://www.google.com/maps/@44.9801529 ... 312!8i6656

Quite a transformation of a single block.

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Re: Xcel Energy HQ

Postby seamonster » October 30th, 2015, 10:11 am

This is totally great news! Also probably makes a good extension of the skyway and possibility of getting the library connected!? One surface lot away!!! Ha!
;)

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Re: Xcel Energy HQ - 401 Nicollet

Postby Anondson » October 30th, 2015, 10:19 am

I wonder if the building owners consider the costs of placing bland buildings along a signature pedestrian street the city wants activated, and the cyclical costs involved with "reinventing" the street because of the bland buildings facing it that get passed on to them...

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Re: Xcel Energy HQ

Postby Nathan » October 30th, 2015, 10:28 am

This is totally great news! Also probably makes a good extension of the skyway and possibility of getting the library connected!? One surface lot away!!! Ha!
;)
I personally love the skyways, that's no secret, that was also before I knew how cheap opus was going to be.

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Re: Xcel Energy HQ - 401 Nicollet

Postby trigonalmayhem » October 30th, 2015, 1:34 pm

There's a greater imperative to get buildings "right" though, because a building will last much longer than any transportation improvement, short of a tunnel maybe. A bad bike line can be restriped. Even a too wide ROW can be rebuilt in the normal process of road maintenance. I guess a building can be reclad, so maybe we can fix the good to become great.
I'm gonna have to disagree with you here. With the shoestring transit budget here a bad transit investment will either mean decreased transit spending (see, it doesn't work!), more good money after bad (red line), or just a refusal to revisit a corridor for better options for a pretty substantial amount of time (no one seems eager to realign the light rail downtown or rebuild Hiawatha into something that actually supports transit oriented development).

So I'd say as soon as you're talking about anything more expensive than a plain old bus shelter, you need to get it right because we'll be stuck with it for at least a decade if not two. They're currently delaying a whole slew of projects to wait on the resolution of other projects to avoid possibly redoing a street more than once in the next twenty years (I'm thinking specifically of the nicollet central streetcar and west 7th corridors).

As for the Xcel building, I don't really have an opinion. It's not great but it beats a parking ramp. With buildings as with transit, I've learned to lower by expectations here because everything is done the cheapest or easiest way possible, even if the best way is only slightly harder or more expensive. "Aim low and achieve" should be the state motto.

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Re: Xcel Energy HQ - 401 Nicollet

Postby Avian » October 30th, 2015, 1:45 pm

If nothing else, some people seem to like it, so your "objective" opinion that it's mediocre is objectively wrong.

Because the entire field of architectural criticism is garbage!

Sent from my Nexus 5X using Tapatalk
Ergo, every field of criticism in every human endeavor is garbage?

Sorry, I'm with Nathan on this one. This building is bad. You can tell it was designed on a computer, not with the human hand. Those of us who went through architecture school will understand what I mean.

“Wise men speak because they have something to say; fools because they have to say something.”
― Plato

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Re: Xcel Energy HQ - 401 Nicollet

Postby FISHMANPET » October 30th, 2015, 2:01 pm

Well, garbage in that it's completely subjective and mostly up to the whims of the particular critic. Pretty much the same with all other kinds of art.

And again, never said it wasn't bad. But that's not really the point I'm trying to make here. First, the vast majority of people just plain don't' care about design. They may say they do, but have you seen the suburbs? Most people don't actually care about design. Maybe they can say "I like this" or "I don't like that" but they're certainly not going to be able to discuss it in any way. So when the vast majority of people just don't care, how do you engage them on something with this? I think it takes more than "it stinks, trust me" to communicate this kind of stuff to a broad audience. If architects and designers want the public to care about this, you've gotta do a better job of articulating that.

There are people here that like this building, so it's not painfully obvious to all that it's bad. And Nathan brings up the Xcel building in Denver as a counter example of a better building by the same company, but there are people here that don't like that, so again it's not painfully obvious that the Denver example is better.

Transportation and Land Use reform advocates here have had an incredible amount of discussion not just about the reform we seek, but how to communicate that reform in a way that resonates with people and how to actually make that reform happen. And I'm hoping for the same from those who would like architectural "reform."

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Re: Xcel Energy HQ - 401 Nicollet

Postby Nathan » October 30th, 2015, 2:54 pm

Please stop miss quoting me. The only reason I brought up the Denver building was to prove that Xcel doesn't have a track record or a corporate requirement to reside in simple non ostentatious buildings. I pointed out the Denver building because i find that it is quite ostentatious (and not at all attractive imo), and therefore that theory was invalid.

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Re: Xcel Energy HQ - 401 Nicollet

Postby FISHMANPET » October 30th, 2015, 3:05 pm

Alright, fair enough, you never said the Denver building was good. But that doesn't really actually change the thesis of my post which you're still ignoring.

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Re: Xcel Energy HQ - 401 Nicollet

Postby MNdible » October 30th, 2015, 3:16 pm

Sometimes, just sometimes, an expert opinion should be listened to more carefully than that of some guy off the street. I'm not saying that you have to agree with an architectural critic (far from it), but consider that they've probably thought about this a lot more than most people have.

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Re: Xcel Energy HQ - 401 Nicollet

Postby Nathan » October 30th, 2015, 3:18 pm

You have some vendetta against art and anything that doesn't have non objective empirical evidence.

this building is like showing up to your wedding in sweatpants instead of a tux, sure it's a sport coat made out of sweats material, but it's still just sweatpants. your body is covered! I'm sure I can get at least 100 people from somewhere to say they like it, so it must be appropriate. Because fashion and tradition are objective and total garbage.

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Re: Xcel Energy HQ - 401 Nicollet

Postby FISHMANPET » October 30th, 2015, 3:47 pm

Whole lotta people where jeans and baseball caps at weddings (not as part of the wedding party, Joseph A Banks sells Camo vests to go with suits, and, well, tux rentals from Mens Wearhouse exist. I'm going to a wedding in a few weeks where I know the bride and groom would much rather be in sweatpants than in a tux and a dress (hell nobody understands the difference between eveningwear vs daywear when it comes to black vs white tie, tails, etc).

Part of the reason I'm down on architectural criticism is because it's so finicky. Nothing is universally loved the moment it's built. It's new for a while, and then it's a fad and out of fashion, until it craters to the bottom after maybe 40 or 50 years, and then for 20 or 30 years, if it's around that long, it slowly crawls back. In the 20's architects looked at Brooklyn Brownstones that are now beloved, and called them "Brownstone Blight". We demolished the Metropolitan Building because it was viewed as ugly at the time (though it was 71 at the time, and many wanted to protect it, but not enough apparently, as its gone now). I just don't see a great track record of being able to make a value judgement of what will work in 70 plus years. And I'm sure those architects of the past held those views with the best of intentions and all the best knowledge of the time. But I think history has show that those views are categorically empirically wrong. But the only way we can really say that is with 50-100 years of evidence.

So, I guess, full confession, I've been ragging on you forever to provide something that I know you, or pretty much any other architect, can't provide, which is an objective framework for analysis of a newly built building. The only way to get that objective analysis is to let it be for 70 plus years.

I found this on Reddit, and it happens to be by our own mdcastle, and I think it's very appropriate:
They thought it was ugly stone monster and that the people trying to preserve it were anti-progress nuts. Just like we're trying to destroy as much mid-century modern stuff as we can now. Witness Peavy Plaza or the original Nicollet Mall.
My theory if architecture goes in cycles of about a generation
Generation 1 builds it
Generation 2 uses it
Generation 3 hates it and tears down as much as they can
Generation 4 hates generation 3 for tearing it down
Although against my own views, I'm mostly railing about views on less than new buildings, not brand new buildings. I don't really think in 70 years we'll be rushing to preserve this. But maybe we will, who knows! Nobody can really be sure, and maybe that's my point.

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Re: Xcel Energy HQ - 401 Nicollet

Postby mplsjaromir » October 30th, 2015, 3:58 pm

There is nothing wrong with critiquing the design.

The problem is that the city only has statutory authority. If the city wanted a law that only gorgeous buildings get built, I would have no idea how to even begin drafting such an ordinance. I know they try to limit the amount of different materials on the facade. Finding a formula that can make certain a building looks good and can withstand a legal challenge is nigh-on-impossible.

The most vexing difficulty facing the construction of new beautiful office buildings is the secular decline in office space demand and more speciously the decline of prestige office space. The city could make the design requirements much more strict, but then the risk becomes companies not even bothering with tough design requirements.

The cities that are known to have the best architecture are full of dull buildings, even on their prominent thoroughfares. I will not get worked up about this.

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Re: Xcel Energy HQ - 401 Nicollet

Postby Nathan » October 30th, 2015, 4:05 pm

The point is the location, if any road in this state represents your wedding day/wedding party, where you shouldn't wear sweatpants even if you really want to this is it. All the houses in the suburbs, those are everyday jeans and t shirts, no big deal, I get the function of that. Comfortable, spacious, to be replaced. Our state only has one "main street" I don't care if it's a cut of tux or a style of wedding dress that everyone likes... or what the evolution of that style is... you traditionally put your best foot forward. It's well thought about, nice materials, who's to say what specific ones, there's lots of variables, but there's a general concensus about what makes a wedding dress and what doesn't.

And I totally agree with the generations of style appreciation, that's why I fight for preservation of important mid century and post modern buildings that not everyone appreciates.

Someday I'll try to find more resources when I'm not running around doing errands... it's Halloween weekend after all.

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Re: Xcel Energy HQ - 401 Nicollet

Postby sushisimo » October 31st, 2015, 3:11 pm

I'm wondering, are they going to slap some more ham/maroon paint on this sucker? It already looks beat up and washed out.

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Re: Xcel Energy HQ - 401 Nicollet

Postby Silophant » February 26th, 2016, 8:57 pm

Update: The building is pretty much complete. It officially opens on March 15th, with the various moves between it, 414 Nicollet, and Marquette Plaza happening before Xcel's MP lease ends at the end of June.

I couldn't (didn't) get a not glarey picture, but this Lake Street Station Apartments-level effort shows a big Xcel logo inside the lobby, clearly meant to be seen from down 4th St. Hopefully this means that the new lobby won't get covered in window clings like 414.
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