Design: Local Architecture Firm Makes Good

Award-winning—and modest—firm Vincent James Associates Architects puts a refined twist on projects near and far

The Dayton House, one of VJAA's first significant projects, could be easily mistaken for a small art gallery.

Image credit: Paul Crosby

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By: Phillip Koski |   February 2012   |  From the print edition

Unless you are a member of the Minneapolis Rowing club, a recent St. John’s alum or a Dayton, chances are you have never seen a building produced by the Minneapolis-based architecture firm Vincent James Associates Architects (VJAA). And that’s unfortunate, because their work represents some of the finest buildings made in the last 20 years. 

If that statement seems a stretch, consider that the modest, 18-person practice—whose portfolio of projects is scattered across the globe—was recently recognized with the 2012 “Firm of the Year” award (the highest honor the American Institute of Architects gives to a firm). Let me assure you, this is a big deal. Of the 20,000 architecture firms working in the U.S., only one gets singled out each year for veneration and is held up as the model of professional and design excellence.  

True to Midwestern standards of modesty, however, VJAA is not as good at blowing its own horn as it is at consistently and quietly cranking out remarkable and beautifully detailed projects. By a quirk of fate, the firm’s few projects built in Minnesota are either tucked away, out of sight in urban recesses, or dispersed across remote outstate locales off the beaten path.  

Founded in 1995 by namesake architect Vincent James and his partners Jennifer Yoos and Nathan Knutson, VJAA initialy found success with one of its first significant projects, the Ken and Judy Dayton house. Perched on a leafy promontory at the west end of Franklin Avenue, the limestone and glass house could just as easily be mistaken for a small art gallery. Set back from the street and screened by garden walls and plantings, the house is a minimalist study in solids and voids, and in the blurring between inside and outside.

Also minimalist in form is the Minneapolis Rowing Club Boathouse, finished in 2001. A long, low black box parked on the western bank of the Mississippi River, the building lies in the shadow of the Lake Street Bridge. While the building is a highly restrained work outside, its interior is animated by the rotating pitch of the roof trusses, which evoke the mechanics of pulling an oar.  

VJAA has completed more far-flung projects: St. John’s Abbey in Collegeville, Minn.; pristine woody cabins in northern Minnesota and Wisconsin; a student center in Beirut, another at Tulane in New Orleans; as well as condo renovations in Chicago and New York. One feature all the firm’s projects share is that they all win awards for design excellence, including several for un-built projects through the Progressive Architecture Awards, a longstanding awards program that celebrates cutting-edge designs on the boards.

Another common thread in VJAA’s work is the intensity of thought, care and research put into each project. Shunning the cheap thrills of extravagant forms and materials, VJAA’s work is based on a measured and time-consuming process that looks beyond surface effects. Buildings are connected to their place, time and purpose in ways that are revealed over the course of years, not minutes.  

Highly rational and verging on asceticism, the firm’s body of work is firmly rooted at one end of the architectural spectrum. If Frank Gehry’s twisted forms and willful spontaneity represent the Dionysian branch of architecture, VJAA clearly ascribes to the cerebral Apollonian branch. In writing her recommendation letter, fellow architect Andrea Leers, FAIA, put it plainly, “In an era frequently characterized by architectural indulgence and excess, VJAA is creating architecture of refinement and restraint.”

VJAA also is creating new designs that may double the number of built works in its hometown: a gallery renovation at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, a new landscape plaza on the east end of the U of M’s Washington Avenue pedestrian bridge and a new Walker library in Uptown. Unlike prior local work, these new projects will all be public and easily accessible. And if history is to be relied upon, they will be elegant and award-winning places to boot.