MODERN TIMES

Ralph Rapson 1914–2008
Minneapolis architect Ralph Rapson, one of the world’s oldest practicing architects at the age of 93, died of heart failure on March 29. Rapson had a complicated relationship with the city he served. He was personally beloved and regarded as a visionary, but some of his projects stirred impassioned debate, and several of his major works were demolished within his lifetime.

Trained at the University of Michigan and the Cranbrook Academy of Art, where he studied with Eliel Saarinen, Rapson had a long and varied career; his projects included Case Study House No. 4 (1945); furniture designs for Knoll; International Style United States embassies in Denmark and Sweden (both 1954) and a house in Wayzata, Minnesota, for the Pillsbury family of flour-milling fame. Two of his Minneapolis projects are particularly well-known: the first Tyrone Guthrie Theater (1963), elegantly cubist, and Cedar Square West, familiar to television viewers the world over as the Brutalist, Le Corbusier-inspired apartment house where the fictional Mary Richards lived for the last two seasons of The Mary Tyler Moore Show.

Rapson also led the architecture school at the New Bauhaus School of Design in Chicago in the early 1940s and headed the School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture at the University of Minnesota from 1954 to 1984. Though a birth defect had necessitated the amputation of his right arm at the elbow as a small child, it did not prevent him from drawing copiously every day, and he was an avid exerciser decades before it became fashionable.

Architecture and education were not his only talents; Rapson was able to define community needs and find the funding and resources to fulfill them. In 1962, he conceived Cedar Square West in answer to the federal government’s “New Town in Town” urban renewal initiative, an early attempt to revitalize America’s inner cities. Drawing on his experiences living and working in Europe, where people of disparate backgrounds and incomes lived in close proximity, Rapson envisioned Cedar Square West as housing for both market-rate and income-assisted tenants, a revolutionary concept at the time.

Financed by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and private investment, Cedar Square West took more than a decade to bring to fruition. In the meantime, Rapson’s Tyrone Guthrie Theater was built in 1963 on the grounds of the Walker Art Center and became one of Minneapolis’s best-loved buildings. Seating more than 1,400 people around one of America’s first thrust stages, the theater was human in scale and rich in colorful décor, including a remarkable “confetti” pattern of varicolored theater seats.

When Cedar Square West opened in April 1973, it stirred controversy in Minneapolis; lawsuits were filed challenging the developer’s environmental impact statements. It also had difficulty attracting market-rate tenants; the Cedars-Riverside area in which it was located was considered Minneapolis’ Skid Row. By the time The Mary Tyler Moore Show depicted Mary Richards’s cheery apartment for the last time in 1977, Cedar Square West was in serious trouble. By 1980, HUD had foreclosed on the project, turning it over to the Minneapolis Community Development Agency, which ran it as public housing and renamed it Riverside Plaza.

While Riverside Plaza had its problems, including drug-dealing and violent crime that became the stuff of local legend, they were not the only challenges to Rapson’s reputation during the last two decades of his life. His Pillsbury House of 1963 was torn down by new owners in 1997 and the Guthrie was demolished in 2006, despite a long, impassioned battle to save it, a victim of expansion at the Walker Art Center.

None of this dampened Rapson’s zest for life or his productivity. In his later years, he designed a series of prefabricated houses called Greenbelt, based on his Case Study House of 1945, for Wieler Homes. Wieler also put the architect’s Rapson Rocker for Knoll back into production, with laminated wood replacing the solid wood of the original; both rocking chair and house remain in production. Rapson also lived to see the reputation of Cedar Square West greatly rehabilitated; in 2004, the complex received the 25-year Award from the Minnesota chapter of the American Institute of Architects. His practice, Ralph Rapson & Associates, Inc., is carried on by his son, Toby Rapson, and his grandson Lane Rapson.– SM


The Eameses Go Postal
Eames aficionados have something affordable to collect. The United States Postal Service is honoring Charles and Ray Eames with a sheet of 16 commemorative first class 42-cent stamps featuring their designs, from the Lounge chair with ottoman and the molded plywood chair to the Hang-it-all and the Aluminum Group management chair. Appropriately, the stamps, which will be introduced on June 17, were designed by Derry Noyes, granddaughter of Eliot Noyes, Charles’s friend and director, in the 1940s, of the industrial design department at the Museum of Modern Art. The sheet of stamps can be purchased for $6.72 at local post offices as well as online at www.usps.com. — AT