Q&A with Ralph Rapson

At ninety-three, preeminent Minneapolis architect Ralph Rapson isn’t done. Pillsbury House was tilled under by a Philistine banker; Cedar Square West has been tarnished by incompetent landlords and a series of cheap shot nicknames; and his modernist masterpiece, the original Guthrie Theater, succumbed, ironically, to an expansion of an avant-garde sculpture garden. But his latest project—the long-planned glass-house conservatory for the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum—will be, he says, “better than anything I’ve ever done.” A darling of Dwell magazine and the modernist revival, Rapson still shows up at his Cedar-Riverside office to work for a few hours a day. He brings his merciless objective eye to bear on his own career: “My life has been a duality between practice and the academic,” he says. “I sometimes wonder why I haven’t done more buildings.”

One of modernism’s tenants was a rejection of architectural tradition, so how do you feel about your creations being disposed of after thirty years?
Here in the States, we are guilty of kind of a paper-cup attitude. Building, tearing down, moving on. In Europe, I’ve discovered that they use old buildings, they revise them, they add to them. But here, we’re much more prone to tear them up. The Pillsbury House, for instance. I talked to the new owner immediately after he bought it and suggested that we’d be happy to work with him to make it compatible to his needs. His answer was “It’s not my cup of tea.” Then he hung up. He was head of one of the banks here in the Twin Cities. He immediately tore the house down and broke the property—it was a big piece of property—into four sites. He was interested in the land. I suppose you could say that about the Walker. They owned the land that the Guthrie was on. They wanted to expand and the Guthrie wanted to expand. I guess one of the things I’ve learned in my life [he chuckles] is that the land is more important than the building.

That’s a very Frank Lloyd Wright philosophy.
Yeah [chuckles]. Well, Wright has been very fortunate. A number of his buildings have been destroyed, of course, but he has a certain reverence that most of us never quite acquire.

Do you feel gratified or vindicated that the modernism you championed has become design’s orthodoxy?
One sees it not so much in architecture, you see it very much in interiors: chairs, tables, desks, and so on. If you open up any magazine, you see ads for Eames furniture or many others. This Rapson [rocker] of mine, we haven’t sold a great number of them, 100 or so, but these older things keep returning. I think it’s a great circle.

You can see the Cedar–Riverside towers from your window.
Sure. We look this way at the [University of Minnesota’s] Carlson Center—which in my mind is way overblown. This whole side of the campus is embracing the Carlsons’ money.

You’ve heard some of the derisive nicknames—Ghetto in the Sky, the Crack Stacks. Is that a symbol of a failed utopian vision?
It’s also called Little Somalia. One of the reasons we stay here is that I like this area. It’s home and where we’ve worked for a long time. I find the complex quite an interesting, innovative design that started out as a mixed housing project—we wanted high-income people, we wanted low-income people, we wanted renters, we wanted leasers. The new owners have converted it into subsidized housing because in addition to the rent they get a 10 percent subsidy from the state. I would condemn them for not taking proper care of it. But the basic idea, the mixed-income model, is a very contemporary idea.