Best new building of the past 20 years in the Twin Cities? How about CHS Field, the Saints stadium in Lowertown, St. Paul? It’s like a quick ink sketch come to life in wood and steel: straight lines, natural geometry, clean surfaces. And yet at the same time, it’s a wildly functional creation, welcoming and disgorging crowds in a blink.
The building’s footprint in the neighborhood feels human scale. In roughly 30 seconds, you can walk from your seat to the historic farmers’ market plaza in Lowertown. (Compare CHS Field to U.S. Bank Stadium—a massive Imperial Star Destroyer that fell on a neighborhood.) This building not only makes for a perfect spot to watch the Saints (or the Hamline Pipers), but it matches the ethos of St. Paul: useful, unpretentious, and built for a good life.
Would it surprise you to know that the American Academy of Arts and Letters once described the aesthetic of the building’s architect, Julie Snow, as “a ballerina in work boots”?
You can see the gracefulness at CHS Field: the intimate curve of the seating, the jewel-box second-story space fit for weddings and rentals. And, in work-boot mode, it gets a lot done, from the solar arrays to the 95 percent–recycled materials.
The success of CHS Field and the rest of Snow’s recent portfolio helped win Snow Kreilich Architects the 2018 AIA Architecture Firm Award, one of the trade’s preeminent prizes, bestowed on a single office each year. And her success (joined by partner Matthew Kreilich) has attracted national clients with challenging urban infill projects.
In the spring, Snow, working with the firm HOK, revealed designs for a new 22,500-seat soccer stadium to go in downtown St. Louis. The renderings put the pitch below street grade; spectators sit in the shade of white panels that look as if they were grown from crystal. Earlier this year, the Allyn Family Foundation tapped Snow Kreilich to design a $20 million chunk of Syracuse, including housing, offices, public space, and a market.
Close to home, Snow Kreilich is working on a project touted as “the living room of the North Loop”: a hotel woven around existing historic buildings on the block kitty-corner to The Bachelor Farmer.
The woman who penned that memorable quote is Billie Tsien, the prominent New York architect currently designing The Obama Presidential Center. I called up Tsien, and I mentioned that many—most?—people in the Twin Cities probably don’t know the name Julie Snow.
Tsien was incredulous. “You guys should recognize your homegrown, thoughtful people,” Tsien told me.
If you live here, you’ve almost certainly stood in Snow’s spaces: the Children’s Museum, in St. Paul (designed with former architecture partner Vincent James), the Museum of Russian Art, a slew of light rail stations, and a whole bunch of very nice apartment buildings like the Humboldt Lofts. Is there a woman in the history of the Twin Cities who has created more of our built city? I doubt it.
Back to the work boots for a moment. Snow and Kreilich’s most acclaimed designs may also be among the most constrained and utilitarian of projects: ports of entry into the United States, including one in Warroad, Minnesota (2010), and one in Van Buren, Maine (2013). These are land crossings where car travelers stop and present papers to border patrol agents. They’re secure—fortified—structures, built at government rates. Yet the port of entry in Warroad takes the shape, and projects the aura, of a giant wood sculpture. The building’s shelflike overhang appears so weighty as to exert its own gravity. It’s a gorgeous place to have your passport scrutinized.
If your interest in design sticks to the ballerina side of the spectrum, pop over to the Snow Kreilich website to check out a handful of private homes that she has designed all over North America. This category includes a distinctive concrete cube of a house on Lyndale and 38th Street in south Minneapolis. Or you may prefer the North Country cabin that looks like a light box over Lake Superior, which she designed for a very important client—namely, herself.
•••••
I met Julie Snow for lunch at Tullibee at the Hewing, which is so close to her office that our server knew her order by heart (the smoked salmon toast). For all her esteem in the realm of national architecture, Snow has made almost no pop-cultural local footprint. Tsien’s words echoed in my head: Recognize our homegrown people?
You can recognize Snow by her 180-pound black-and-white Great Dane, Cooper, which she walks with her husband, Jack Snow, on the path around Lake Harriet. It’s near where the two live and raised their three children. Julie and Jack met at the University of Colorado. That’s where a young Julie VandenBerg landed instead of Hope College, in Holland, Michigan, where the previous five generations of her conservative West Michigan Dutch family had matriculated. Instead, Snow strategically declared that she wanted to study architecture; Hope College didn’t offer that program.
“Do you have any interest in birth order?” Julie Snow asked. “I’m the second of five. A negotiator, but also a rebel. I’m not going to compete with this person that got here first, and I’m going to go my own way, because I can. Nobody’s watching!”
That path led the couple to the Twin Cities, where Snow took a job at HGA. She had three children while at HGA. But when the youngest, David, was around four years old, health scares landed him in the hospital. Snow took a leave of absence from HGA to keep an eye on her son, and then kept extending it.
Meanwhile, a previous HGA client pestered her to come back and design his plastics factory. Snow, he maintained, was the only one who would listen to his thoughts in enough detail to turn them into a functional space that could recast his company’s culture. Snow asked her boss at HGA for the firm’s blessing to design the factory, started teaching at the University of Minnesota architecture school, and hung out her shingle. (You can see the plans for that plastics plant as the opening spread in the 2005 monograph on Snow’s work, published by Princeton Architectural Press.)
“This may sound snotty, so be careful with it,” Snow said. “But when my son was in the hospital, I knew I just could not go back to work and enclose more space in the world. I had to do something that had a positive effect.”
She added, “It’s funny: David’s time in the hospital—it never defined him. But in a funny way, it probably defined me.”
As one of two women to graduate from her architecture program in Colorado, Snow figures she spent many moments in the first period of her architecture life as the only woman in the room. (Today, Snow Kreilich is, for the industry, quite diverse: More than half the firm is women and/or people of color.) That early perspective helped fill out Snow’s architectural talent with a complex set of people-navigating skills. She can talk comfortably with everyone from a billionaire client to a structural engineer. Part of her architect’s art, Snow told me, is “to make people think your ideas are their ideas. That’s a good skill to have.”
And while there has always been a role for genius in putting your name on an architecture firm, Snow seems unstinting in her devotion to preparation. For example, she spent seven years attending Saints games, knowing that one day the stadium commission might come up.
Snow Kreilich’s big AIA award certainly raised its profile in New York, L.A., and other glamour markets. But Bob Ganser, a former Snow associate who teaches architecture at the University of Minnesota, suggests Snow has long stood out as one of the country’s leading regional modernists. That is, architects who have taken the work of classical modernists, like Mies van der Rohe, and translated them into regional expressions. Snow, in this analysis, is a northern modernist, working with unique conditions, such as the need to amplify scant winter daylight.
I got to talking to Ganser about what project a visiting starchitect would want to see of Snow’s. His answer surprised me. They’d want to see CHS Field, he said, sure. But more than anything, they’d want to get into the office, meet Snow, and see what she’s up to next. A peer would be especially interested in the technical building details. Snow often seems to build unmediated on raw outcroppings of bedrock. She captures winter light without sacrificing winter heat.
“Julie’s been kicking ass technically for a long time, which isn’t maybe something people outside of architecture can appreciate.”
But can people inside her architecture appreciate it? Next time you’re in CHS Field, look for the hand of one of the Twin Cities’ most influential homegrown, thoughtful people—or if not her hand, perhaps her light?
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