For a major university, the most valuable currency is not its sports teams, but its scholars and their accomplishments. The University of Minnesota recognizes that, and celebrates its most renowned faculty and students with a new installation that allows viewers a window into their brilliant minds.
Archiving Memory was a temporary, site-specific artwork and memorial based on a rare collection of Holocaust-era photos and oral histories at the University of Minnesota's Elmer L. Andersen Library.
Working in collaboration with the design department at the Walker, Pentagram Design developed a dynamic information display for the exterior of the museum's new expansion by Herzog & de Meuron. News and schedules of museum programs and events are rear-projected onto the building exterior in two streams of information that parallel the glow of traffic on nearby Hennepin Avenue. The Walker's graphic identity is organized around an institutional typeface, and the display exemplifies this flexible system of information as identity.
Speaking of Home was a public art project that sought to reimagine the use and experience of the Twin Cities skyway system—the most expansive in North America—beyond its function as a utilitarian above-ground pedestrian thoroughfare.
The first skyway public art project in the history of the Twin Cities, it was installed in the IDS-Macy’s skyway bridge, 20 ft. above one of Minneapolis’s key downtown arteries and in the heart of the city’s financial and commercial district.
At Olson, connection is all that counts. For creativity to become contagious, it must first be human. Slated to be the largest advertising agency in Minneapolis, the rapidly expanding Olson enlisted Gensler to interpret its strategies for a design solution structured on Olson Brand Anthropology. Olson secured 125,000 square feet within Minneapolis’s historic Ford Center building, and the design team was tasked with allowing the industrial character to shine through.
