The daily digest of Twin Cities culture | Secrets of the City

Bad design is all around us, but there's no bad design like bad election year design. Let's take a moment here to catalog some notable atrocities from recent election cycles, and then hang our heads in bipartisan shame. Offender number one is Bush/Cheney's militantly mindless logo from 2004; you can almost hear the designer making phlegmatic war movie sound effects to himself as he drafted it.

There are certain works of art the body wholly understands before the mind kicks in with its distancing powers of disembodied detachment and analysis. In the Twin Cities, there is very little art in the public realm -- in what we now call "the commons"-- that does this. Most public art, strained through the cheesecloth of three or four bureaucracies, is earnestly mediocre, almost by necessity. Much of what wins competitions is "plop art," dutifully commissioned to meet the tithing requirement for one-percent-for-art public building projects.

I've been living in the same city for a long time. Maybe that's why I crave the unusual. I abhor cookie-cutter architecture, which is just as prevalent in urban areas as in cul-de-sac suburbia. How many three-story brick condos with railed terraces have you seen constructed in recent years?

For a guy who spends all year thinking about Halloween, Will Niskanen could hardly be described as scary. Slight and soft-spoken, dressed in khakis and brown loafers, and exhibiting the good manners of a Boy Scout, Niskanen greets me at one of his favorite haunts, Mill City Cafe, pulling out a chair and offering to order a beverage. His studio is just upstairs, so the café is a great place to take a break from sketching skulls and spiders and tombstones.

"Log cabins are a dime a dozen,” said Richard Olson, lighting up yet another Marlboro. “We looked at some of those. They were junk. They were put together by amateurs. Some of the logs had separated; you could see right through them. All these trees here, tip some of them on the side, and you’ve got a log home … logs, logs, logs.” A suggestion is put forth: Is a log home in the woods, well, redundant? “Yeah,” he agreed, clanking his spoon around in his coffee cup, “something like that.”

On the surface, Armi Ratia and Lilly Pulitzer have a lot in common. Both women got their start in the 1950s and became famous for producing fabrics printed with bright colors and bold graphics. Both had a spirited, playful appeal—Pulitzer had her kitschy duck and turtle patterns, and Ratia named her company Marimekko, which translates from the Finnish as “little Mary dress.” And Jackie Kennedy brought a jolt of publicity to both labels when she turned up in magazine features wearing their dresses.

It’s early June, and the house going up near Cedar Lake is still weeks from being completed. Already, however, its roof needs replacing. The new roof has just been dropped off at the construction site: It consists of metal-encased foam panels bundled into large, rectangular plastic-bound packages—kind of like a giant, shrink-wrapped twenty-four-pack of Kleenex from Costco. The old roof is not cracked or leaky or flimsy; rather, it’s what you might call dishonest.