Gobsmacked. Astounded. Delighted.
Leonardo da Vinci’s name, three stories high on a stone building, somehow caught my eye as I hurried to the bus. Was it the gold lettering? The ready-for-liftoff dynamic V? Perhaps—at this intersection otherwise dominated by the 
weightlifter-bulkiness of the Minneapolis Convention Center to the southeast and a downcast city parking lot to the north—a sotto voce call from above to seek joy, beauty, love.
Other great names topped twin windows: Christopher Wren, renowned for St. Paul’s Cathedral in London; Filippo Brunelleschi, architect of Florence’s must-see domed cathedral; and, Charles Follen McKim. Didn’t he design the original building for the Minneapolis Institute of Arts? (His firm did, I learned; he had already crossed over to that heavenly city.)
Later, on a more leisurely day, I walked another way by this now Catholic Charities office and came upon the original ornate entrance for this historic Architects & Engineers Building. Built in 1920 
in the Renaissance Revival style, it was a design incubator conceived by a group of influential designers dedicated to the City Beautiful movement.[1]
This treasure is just one among the buildings and details, windows and bas reliefs, that decorate our Twin Cities downtowns. I would have noticed none of them—except that I take the bus and walk, observe and appreciate the out-of-the ordinary, the individualized, the flourishes—touches that have been abandoned in favor of glass sheets held by metal frames. Skyscrapers mirror the sky; it’s no wonder the birds are confused and crash. An apparent exception, with strips of Kasota stone used in a “modernized art deco” style building, while lovelier than many, still seems sterile and impersonal to me.
With my love for old ways of doing things, as in the Art Deco work, Lee Lawrie’s Voice of the People, 
above a door at St. Paul’s City Hall, I recognize that I may be dismissed as nostalgic for a time in which I never lived. Yet, I moved by my dismay at the proliferating office building in the gray flannel suit, each one interchangeable with the next bland glossy construction, distinguished only by the signs proclaiming the occupying corporation.
Look at the Foshay Tower in the image; compared with the lumpy headquarters below and the aquarium in the sky on the right, it has character. Wilbur Foshay’s name is engraved on it: personalized, built to last and striking as the tallest building on the skyline until 1972. A company has made a hotel out of it but it’s still the Foshay.
Our built environment was briefly considered by Pope Francis in his amazing encyclical Laudato Si on climate change. “If architecture reflects the spirit of an age, our megastructures and drab apartment blocks express the spirit of globalized technology, where a constant flood of new products coexists with a tedious monotony,” the pope wrote. “Let us refuse to resign ourselves to this, and continue to wonder about the purpose and meaning of everything. Otherwise we would simply legitimate the present situation and need new forms of escapism to help us endure the emptiness.”[2]
A compelling and profound spirituality compared with my street-level observations. Godsmacked, you might say, to raise my sights higher.
[1] http://www.ci.minneapolis.mn.us/hpc/landmarks/hpc_landmarks_2nd_ave_s_1200-08_architects_engineers_building
[2] Section 113. http://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals/documents/papa-francesco_20150524_enciclica-laudato-si.html
Allison Campbell Jensen 