Experimental City in Minnesota 1966-72

Courtesy Northwest Architectural Archives, University of Minnesota Libraries

Dewey Thorbeck, FAIA, FAAR, Senior Research Fellow

Watching the excellent Chad Freidrichs documentary about the Minnesota Experimental City (MXC) reminded me of my early involvement with the project. When I returned to Minnesota after two years at the American Academy in Rome, I was asked to join the part-time teaching faculty in the School of Architecture that was then part of the Institute of Technology. It was a period of rapid technological change and in 1964 the Museum of Modern Art in New York City had an exhibit on Twentieth Century Engineering that included a wide range of projects including the geodesic dome over the Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis designed by R. Buckminster Fuller, who had often lectured at the School of Architecture about light weight structures.

During this time Dr. Athelstan Spilhaus was Dean of the Institute of Technology and every Sunday in the Minneapolis paper I read his cartoon strip Our New Age where he outlined his thinking about the future of urban living on the planet. He was a brilliant scientist and in the mid-1960s he proposed that the Federal Government should plan and construct an experimental city to explore new technologies for future urban living. In 1966, when Hubert Humphrey was Vice President, the Federal Government did provide funding to explore the idea in Minnesota, with Spilhaus in charge of the Advisory Committee, and Walter K. Vivrett of the School of Architecture as the Project Director.

Soon after Vivrett asked me to serve on the planning committee and my involvement consisted of participating in four or five workshops with experts in city living from around the world who represented a wide range of social, engineering, planning, and architectural disciplines, to try and clarify what should be done. The workshops were very technology oriented, and summarized in many reports; but, no consensus emerged. I remember that one of my suggestions was to think of it as an integrated landscape community, like an Italian hill town with a geodesic dome over it.

In 1969, after Hubert Humphrey was defeated and Nixon became president, the Federal support for the project was eliminated. A short time later the State of Minnesota took over the project and someone from the state became the project director and the School of Architecture was no longer directly involved in the leadership. Without the vision of it being a Federally sponsored experimental project for the future, it lost its national focus and faded away after a site in northern Minnesota was selected.

I had never seen the illustrations of MXC in the documentary before and they all look like they were done by the cartoonists who drew images for the Spilhaus comic strip. It was a grand idea that Spilhaus had envisioned with strong national and local support and if Hubert Humphrey had been elected President in 1968, who knows what might have happened.