Audio City Hall restoration project to give Minneapolis 'a grand entrance' (story audio) Photos Detail from rotunda stained glass window Stained glass window before renovation A bank of windows on the rotunda back wall View full slideshow (11 images) Your Voice Join the conversation with other MPR listeners in the News Forum.

	E-mail this page			Print this page

City Hall restoration project to give Minneapolis 'a grand entrance'
by Art Hughes, Minnesota Public Radio
January 14, 2003

The center window from a triptych that greets visitors to the rotunda (MPR Photo/Art Hughes)

Sagging stained-glass windows and discolored marble are two of the problems Minneapolis officials hope to fix as they refurbish the main entrance to the century-old City Hall. Workers have erected scaffolding inside the grand, five-story rotunda to facilitate the restoration over the next 11 months.

Minneapolis, Minn. — The white Italian marble walls of the Minneapolis City Hall rotunda haven't been white for some time.

	Stained glass window before renovation

"Legend has it that at some point in the early '70s some sales rep came in and convinced them to put on a coating to help keep the marble clean," said Robert Mack with MacDonald and Mack Architects, the project's lead contractor. "The collective wisdom is it started to turn yellow after just about a year."

Mack says cleaning will also remove decades of dust and smoke that have dulled the finish.

"This all used to be a dingy, buff color," he said. "Years worth of soot and tobacco smoke primarily; the cigar smoke of the famous politicians' back rooms. This is being cleaned chemically with methods that use very low amounts of water so we don't have floods through the building."

Metal scaffolds are now stacked to the ceiling of the rotunda, giving workers access to the walls. But scrubbing the marble is only the secondary pursuit.

	A bank of windows on the rotunda back wall

The $700,000 project began as a way to restore the ornate, leaded stained-glass windows lining the room's back wall. After the nearly 100 years since the windows were installed, they've slouched outward at the bottom under the weight of the glass and lead.

Michael Pilla, a glass artist hired as a consultant for the window restoration, praises the colors, materials and workmanship of the original craftsmen.

"Layers of glass have been added to the primary window to give it a greater sense of depth, nuance and enhance the sense of liquidity and light and transparency," Pilla said. "Much like the kind of things Tiffany and LaFarge were doing at the same time. So this is very, very nice."

A studio in Fairfield, Iowa is rebuilding the windows.

"A paper rubbing of the window is taken so that you end up with a piece of paper that actually gives you a line drawing of where all the pieces of glass go," Pilla said. "Then the window is disassembled one piece at a time. And then each one of those pieces is laid on that rubbing to keep track of it. So it's like taking a very large complex puzzle apart and putting it back together exactly the way you took it apart."

The windows will also benefit from some high tech adjustments. At one they all faced an interior courtyard, but a building addition in the 1930s covered half of them to outside light. Those windows were lit artificially and created a new problem.

	Architect Robert Mack and stained glass consultant Michael Pilla

"If you're here on a cloudy day, the naturally lit ones are dark and the backlit ones are bright," Robert Mack said. "If you're here on a sunny day, the visual appearance is just the opposite; the natural light ones are nice, brilliantly lit and the backlit ones are dull. The plan is to have these with a sensor so the backlighting will be adjusted to more accurately reflect the outdoor conditions so they'll be more uniform throughout the day."

The area behind three of the most detailed windows is not accessible for changing the backlighting bulbs. So the new system will put the lights in an accessible place. Fiber optics will carry the light to the windows.

The work also includes uncovering some stained glass windows hidden by masonite paneling painted to look like marble and reworking the elaborate skylight in the ceiling of the rotunda. The renovation is scheduled to go through November.

News Headlines

Related Subjects