Historically, rivers have served as the ecological and commercial backbones of the communities that boarder them. With the deindustrialization of American cities, these lifelines have been unclaimed for civic use. They lay cluttered; remnants of their past serve as barriers to their potential re-use. This proposal by StossLU seeks to claim the Mississippi River and envision its transformation into park space as a spectacle in its own right within the city of Minneapolis.

+ 8

The design of gas stations is mostly stripped down to that required for bare function. The inextricable relationship of the aesthetics of modernism to that of the automobile begs a different approach, one that fulfills the traditional function of a gas station but also reflects shifting movements within design. Just like the cars that have driven up to utilize them, these gas stations represent design principles contemporary to the time in which they were constructed.

Designed for the Ordos 20+10 project, this office complex by Preston Scott Cohen serves to create a whole new office building typology in its stance on site, promenade, and public space.

+ 13

The Internet is now the library of the past. Where the public library has historically served as the primary source of information gathering and dissemination, we now look to this new virtual, infinitely large library that can be accessed anywhere at any time as the Library of the present.

As a result, the primary roles of today’s physical libraries have shifted. Libraries of the past focused primarily on individualized information consumption. Communal aspects of interaction and information dissemination now represent the core mission of the library when information is more easily accessible. The silent grand beaux-arts reading rooms of New York or Boston have of the past been transformed into flexible communal “living rooms” in Seattle.