Best-Kept Architectural Secret: The Northwest Architectural Archives
The University of Minnesota repository is home to extraordinary collections of correspondence, contracts, drawings, and photographs
By Frank Edgerton Martin | August 15, 2024
Interstate Clinic, 1938, Close Associates Archives (N78), exterior, drawing, painted. Image courtesy of the Northwest Architectural Archives.
SPOTLIGHT
This spotlight appeared in the 2024 ENTER print annual, available for purchase here.
In the 1950s and 1960s, prewar commercial and residential architecture fell precipitously out of fashion. Civic leaders had visions of freeways and monorails, and the Minneapolis Chamber of Commerce’s seal featured a rocket ship blasting off. In the Twin Cities, hundreds of buildings and houses were destroyed and their pieces dispersed to landfills and salvage yards.
For many, the wake-up call came in 1961 with the demolition of the great Metropolitan Building, once the city’s pride. The Northwest Architectural Archives (NAA) was founded at the University of Minnesota in 1970 in response to the sweeping erasure. “If you couldn’t save the building, you could at least save the plans,” explains NAA curator Cheryll Fong.
From its beginnings under founding curator Alan Lathrop, NAA has grown to include more than 300 collections focused on individual architects and designers, architecture firms, contractors, suppliers, and developers in the five-state area. Together, the collections capture the full array of trades, professions, and industries that make buildings possible. They encompass histories of building ownership and uses and of how buildings accrued their layers of change.
Images 1–4: Front elevation and section, St. John’s Episcopal Church, Moorhead, Minnesota, 1899, Cass Gilbert, architect. Rendering of the F. B. Long Residence published in The Architect periodical, 1894, Long & Kees Papers. “Parks” color rendering by Martin Reitz, undated, Martin Reitz Papers. “Rainforest” tapestry by Helena Hernmarck on cover of Interiors magazine, March 1972, Helena Hernmarck Papers. All images courtesy of the Northwest Architectural Archives.
Treasures include: papers from the C. F. Haglin Company, credited with constructing the world’s first concrete grain elevator, now recognized as a National Historic Engineering Landmark; the C. A. P. Turner collection, containing the work of the Minnesota building pioneer who engineered the first mushroom-shaped concrete structural columns to support heavy industrial loads; and correspondence between Henry Cobb of I. M. Pei & Partners and Swedish-born weaver Helena Hernmarck about the installation of her work in a major building project.
Of course, there are also the business records and the working and presentation drawings of the Upper Midwest’s great architecture and engineering firms, large and small. The Liebenberg and Kaplan papers contain stunning elevation drawings of their hundreds of theater projects including the Uptown in Minneapolis and the Nor-Shor in Duluth. Other architects and firms with collections include Thomas Ellerbe, FAIA, Magney & Tusler, Long & Kees, Hewitt and Brown, Cerny Associates, Edwin Lundie, FAIA, Close Associates, and the recently retired Sarah Nettleton, FAIA. Many feature full plan sets and alternative designs never realized.
Fong says she knows of no other archive in the country with NAA’s breadth of annotated working drawings. “There is so much information about social values in a plan set and the specs,” she adds. These materials quietly reveal intentions: Who is the audience? Who is intended to be welcome in this building?
“You think of all the stories that buildings hold,” says Fong. “I hope that by having the archives, those stories are told and new stories are found. There are many treasures in Minnesota that we have yet to find.”
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