A luminous white aerie on the twenty-fourth floor of the Rand Tower in downtown Minneapolis, commanding a rare, Manhattan-worthy view of the surrounding skyscrapers: the HQ of Julie Snow Architects. The red dot matrix of the TCF building’s clock pierces the nighttime panorama. In the far left corner sits the principal of the firm, at work on her G4 laptop—all the toys are black, white, or silver. She’s talking on the phone, but periodically, instead of finishing a sentence, she’ll throw back her head and emit a voluptuous chuckle—a vocal signature that elides language and laughter, erupting frequently in conversation.
You might not guess this aspect of Snow’s personality from her buildings, which tend to be on the abstemious side, not playing for laughs. But the chortle gives it away: underneath it all, she’s a playful person. It’s just that the game is serious, and Snow has a taste for the tough stuff—engineering, construction, the rigors and logic of building assembly—and architecture is, even in this first decade of the twenty-first century, still considered (effectively) a man’s world.
Snow’s buildings are spartan—at least, they may strike one as such at first glance—but also luxurious in their austerity, in a way that recalls seventeenth-century Dutch still-life paintings, with their contradictory surface expressions of frugality and abundance. Her concern seems to be with creating a taut, precise framework for the enactment of daily life rituals, enabling them but not overdetermining them by imposing a heavily stylized environment in which the user feels obliged to conform to the behavioral dictates of the architect. There is a reticence to her architecture that some may find too astringent, wishing for a more explicit voice or more forceful personality. Snow resists, in favor of establishing finely detailed environments wrought out of structural and social necessities and a relish for the crafts of building engineering and assembly: a glass wall that appears to hang free of its support structure in the Great Plains Software project, a turnbuckle that pulls together the weight of a roof in an inner-city police station, the tracery of stellar constellations on a transit stop’s glass canopy. Her aesthetic—wresting elegance out of prefabricated parts and industrial assembly systems— has developed through close collaboration with contractors, building-component manufacturers, and most particularly with engineers: Arup, the international engineering firm, is a regular collaborator. “I’m not an engineer,” she volunteers. “But I’m really good at talking to engineers, listening to them.” (She’s also married to one: Jack Snow.)
Spot the black speck making steady progress across a vast, flat, arable landscape. Zero in and the speck turns out to be a BMW 530i driven at high speed across the Great Plains. In the driver’s seat is a woman dressed in monochrome, focused on the far horizon, Philip Glass at full blast on the stereo. Destination: maybe Fargo, North Dakota, or perhaps this time it’s Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Who can tell these states apart? The plains are the plains after all. A police car appears in pursuit, pulls up beside the car, which, even in the midst of a grit-strewn Midwestern winter, is immaculately shiny. The driver’s window rolls down; she lowers her tortoiseshell glasses and pleads, “Officer, I had no idea I was going that fast.” With a caution, he lets the Emma Peel of architecture go.
Fargo is an unlikely spot on Earth for a cutting-edge software development company. But the freedom and openness of the landscape inspires the corporate ethos of Great Plains Software, and hence its desire for an uninterrupted creative environment for its growing workforce—expanded from 10 people to 650 in fifteen years. Two long bars are mutually offset to maximize views, especially through the south bar’s glass facade, and interspersed by equivalent slabs of landscaping, emulating the shelterbelts that protect crops from the climatic savagery of the open plains.
People think of the plains as unarticulated bland space. But to me it’s extremely profound. There isn’t a topographically determined path across it, so you have to make a decision about where you want to be. This is a particularly American quality: a vast, unrestricted democratic country in which everyone has opportunity. There was no program, no org chart for the Great Plains Software project. They simply said, “We want the building in eighteen months. GO!”
So Snow gathered the clients and engineers in her office for a three-day charette to design the building systems and the ubiquitous IT, developing program and landscape in tandem. Together they devised the most efficient way to span forty-eight feet without interruption—rolled I-sections bolted to round columns. The undivided floor space echoes the seemingly limitless terrain of the Dakota Plains while meeting the software developer’s needs for spatial flexibility and fast telecommunications throughout, accommodating their fluctuating cycles of individual and group activity.
The buildings create a dialogue with the landscape. This huge plain of space allows the users to reconfigure their work environment and navigate it in as free a way as possible. It’s like the deck of a battleship, but the tools are there to connect the team members to the broadest bandwidth.
Transparency, clarity of vision, landscape, and light—these are the principal subjects of Snow’s architecture, though not always explicitly so. Her buildings are often taken to be exercises in minimalism. Lest that seems simply reductive, here’s the real aim: the stripping back of architectural noise to achieve a state of quietness in which a building’s occupants can perceive the quality of the landscape in which their building is set, notice the quotidian passage of light through all the shades of daytime, into dusk, evening, night. Asked when she herself experiences these moments of repose, Snow responds, “When I’m taking the dog for a walk in the morning, around the lake.”
Introspection. Reflection. Meditation. These are the states of calm that her buildings induce and which her clients seek her out to create. She talks of her aspiration toward creating “transformative” architectural experiences, those that still the mind. Spaces that invite you to “just start breathing a little more slowly.”
I look at architecture as a playing field on which people operate. It’s all about making connections between places and activities, site and architecture. Our work is not reductive. It’s inclusive— but not overly complete or complex, so it has room for other things. In a really beautiful room, an unmade bed looks good.
There are characteristic tropes: the insistent rectilinear forms and horizontal massing; low-rise buildings that seem to hug the ground, grow long and thin out of their locations, their proportions and facades reminiscent of Dutch modernism; buildings as vessels for the harvesting of light.
Snow grew up in Michigan, as Julie VandenBerg, in a Dutch-Reform household whose spiritual strictures and disdain for frippery or material flamboyance seems to have had an enduring impact on her aesthetic sensibilities. John Dinkeloo, founding partner in the architecture firm Roche Dinkeloo, was a high-school friend of her father’s. Yet it was her mother who— impressed by the diversity of Dinkeloo’s activities and travel opportunities—encouraged her daughter to take up architecture. Snow began her studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where she experienced a different kind of luminosity:
In Colorado the light is intense. The light in Michigan is like the plains: it’s very uniform and has almost a spatial quality. You’re in a bowl of light—it’s diffuse rather than coming from a source. It’s spatial rather than directional.
Leaf through this monograph and you will see buildings that glow, especially at night—twinkling despite their conspicuous lack of architectural rhinestones. Snow’s Minneapolis light rail transit stations should perhaps be called rail light transit stations, since she uses light and structure to create urban beacons, using an elemental structural grid—rib-like bays that delineate rather than enclose space—to confer brief instances of aesthetic coherence on the new transit system. (Ultimately, overall unity is defeated by the transit authority’s determination to commission “context-specific” designs for the different stops, from a range of architect/artist teams.)
Of the three stations Snow was commissioned to design, two were realized in collaboration with artist Tom Rose, and the third was lost to the scrum of metropolitan design politics. At the Cedar-Riverside station, in a modest neighborhood that has become home to many of Minneapolis’s East African immigrants, the station canopy is glass and decorated with the celestial constellations that might be seen through it. At the Lake Street/ Midtown stop, astride a junction beset with big-box retailers, franchise foods, and parking lots, the station is like a candelabra for a less-than-glamorous part of the city. On this filigree bridge, linear bands of pastel-colored light cling to its illuminated ribs, high and beckoning, offering an ethereal palette against the night—a taste of Mies-meets-Dan-Flavin on a $1.75 transit ride.
Perhaps it has something to do with the CAD-rendering software Snow’s firm uses that her buildings often seem to bask in an impossibly sharp and delineating sunlight—the kind that gives each figure in the scene an intensely etched outline, as if we, too, must be as firm and precise around our edges as her buildings aspire to be. Perhaps this is too much to ask of mere mortals.
Take the University of South Dakota Business School, for example. A competition entry (alas, not to be realized), this building would have had an extraordinary shimmering facade. A set of clear, rectangular volumes pierce the ground-hugging main structure—all the better to emphasize the gorgeousness of its surface, crystalline and seductive in its variegated translucencies. There’s a comment here about the deceptive allure of the shiny (albeit not metal but glass), perhaps befitting an academic department dedicated to the dissemination of techniques for making and managing money.
Snow speaks of always trying to find a place within the conditions of a project or its site that suggests “a contradiction that architecture has to resolve”—the programmatic grit in the oyster, so to speak—“not really to resolve it, but to articulate it, by detailing it intensely.” Often, this point of abrasion has to do with apparently irreconcilable needs: for shelter and exposure, for visual accessibility and physical security, for the pleasure of effulgent light and the comfort of penumbra.
In the Fifth Precinct police station in Minneapolis’s Lyn-dale neighborhood, for example, the task was to make a building that would convey openness and congeniality to the surrounding community while maintaining a sense of security, yet without turning it into a fortress. Here the solution was in “districting” the two main components by creating a large transparent community room at one end and a wing of brick-faced offices for the police officers at the other. Their windows and, thus, everyday work are visible from the street but protected by a low brick wall enclosing a light well.
In the Koehler House, on the dramatic coastline of New Brunswick, the challenge was to reconcile the simultaneously threatening and fragile aspects of the environment. Here, on the savage coast of the Bay of Fundy, the choreography of physical experience—alternating rhythms of tight and open spaces— accentuates the drama of the remarkable site.
It was so loud in the wind we could hardly talk. But as soon as you walk down off the high point of the site, it becomes quiet and warm, and the landscape just holds you. You want both of those experiences in the house. As you come up the staircase, slotted between twelve-foot-high walls, you’re very contained. Then suddenly you’re connected physically and visually to the bold ocean view. It’s a trajectory, this idea of projecting yourself into the landscape. You want to be both protected and connected, to huddle next to the fireplace, or to stand up on the top deck and exult.
Snow expresses a preference for sensual and spatial juxtapositions, which she tends to articulate in evocative catch phrases. The thick/thin thing: pairing of solid and light structures. The cave and the agora: sharp contrasts of dark, contained spaces with open, luminous expanses. The rugged and the refined: natural textures and materials paired with high-tech industrial components—architecture as protection from harsh conditions, whether social or environmental.
Snow began designing factories at $90 per square foot. She has cut her teeth on utilitarian structures out in the middle of nowhere, industrial plants for the postindustrial economy— the Short Run Production facility in New Richmond, Wisconsin (a fast-order manufacturer of small, highly engineered parts); the Origen Center in Menomonie, Wisconsin (a business incubator-cum-corporate training facility); QMR in River Falls, Wisconsin (a fabricator of molded plastic parts). These buildings gain dignity from the relationship of inside to outside: the interiors are flooded with light so as to humanize them, and the prosaic, repetitive activities that go on within them are linked to the ever-changing moods of the natural landscape.
We started out with very pragmatic building types, and we made a strategic choice between exploring more extravagant forms, or exploring details and assembly. You can’t do both: you cannot do something interesting with the skin and the structure and still have a great deal of formal manipulation. We’re a little techie at heart. I just really love construction—the way buildings are made—taking the assembly and refining it. I’ve always said: When I master Ninety Degrees, I’ll move on.
Now she is on the cusp of change, from work that has been predominantly concerned with accommodating pragmatic functions, toward an architecture that is “magnetic.” From the days of ultra-minimalism, working on tight budgets to create new industrial spaces, Snow has progressed to making luxury homes out of former industrial structures along the Minneapolis riverfront. Her latest completed project combines conversion and new construction, turning the former Gold Medal milling complex along the Mississippi River into loft condominiums for the city’s wealthiest denizens and adding a brand new nine-story building that holds its own between the renovated historic facades of the Mill District (including the neighboring Mill City Museum) and the new Jean Nouvel–designed Guthrie Theater.
The oddities in Snow’s portfolio—the SecurePet ID Collar and the Telematic Table proposal for the Walker Art Center— signal her ambition to transcend the boundaries between architecture and other design fields, such as product design and interactive media. Working with experts in other fields, from veterinary science to computer software, her firm has begun to address architecture at scales very different from that of buildings. Whatever the form or purpose, the work is always graced with precision, attention to detail, a sensitivity to the play of light and transparency, and a seductive shimmer.