VJAA

Status: First Place Competition Awarded 2011
Location: Minneapolis, Minnesota
Client: University of Minnesota
Size: 145,000 SF

VJAA was selected as the winner of the Mississippi River Bridge Plaza Design Competition, located adjacent to the newly expanded Weisman Art Museum. The site is an important gateway for the University; creating space for multidisciplinary interaction and acting as an appropriate extension of the Weisman Art Museum’s new Target Studio for Creative Collaboration. The bridge enclosure is transformed into a new gallery for “Art in Motion”, emphasizing new media and creating shared gallery space for the Weisman and for the West Bank Arts Quarter. Areas for display of art and art installations are integrated into the envelope, the display wall at the entry, and on freestanding walls on the enclosure’s interior spaces. The conceptual underpinning of the project is the understanding of the site as a convergence of flows (automobile traffic, river, pedestrians, LRT, shuttle buses for inter-campus movement) and the question of how we can better experience the site through time and motion. The strategies emphasized the organization and choreography of site traffic, optimizing the interaction of different groups of people created by convergences and the use of new media to increase social interaction and amplify the sensation of site flows.