Twin Cities Dopplegängers

The Twin Cities have some funky architecture going on. So what better way to honor its often random beauty than a series on architectural dopplegängers, starting with my very own workplace building?

This is the lovely U.S. Bank Plaza seen from my morning walk for coffee. Two towers, one standing like a short stack of pancakes and the other like a skeleton stark white against the skyline.

And this is what I'm reminded of every day.

What is this, you ask? Why, it's the Cathedral of Erotic Misery. That's right, that's the phrase that is running through my head every morning, getting me off to a really weird start to the day.


The Cathedral was actually an ongoing, unfinished project in the family home of German artist Kurt Schwitters that became an obsession toward the end of his life. Working in the early 1900s, Schwitters worked in multiple styles moving from the dark emotions of German Expressionism to the rule-bending of Berlin's Dadaism to the ideological aesthetics of Soviet-style Abstraction (he partnered with artists like El Lissitsky).

But he never really fit in anywhere. His work was characterized by its use of all sorts of materials--pieces of wood, magazines, and paint all existed side by side. Often addressing common feelings of nostalgia and disillusionment with the accelerating rate of obsolescence, Schwitters was always sort of constructing his own world one step removed from the world everyone else lived in. Which is why it's only fitting he spent so much time modifying his home.


But that world remains completely his own, an absolute mystery. At least it gives me something to contemplate in line at Caribou.