Design: Lord of the Mansard

The ’70s swung with long, flowing roofs.

Image credit: Cody Lidtke

Recommended by the Editor

Destination: Goldstein Museum of Design

Name That Architect

By: Larry Millett |   March 2011   |  From the print edition

Standing in blue-roofed splendor at the corner of 35th Street and Emerson Avenue South in Minneapolis is an apartment building from 1969 that may just represent the, um, pinnacle of a curious episode in the history of local architecture. The three-story building is essentially all roof, its walls shingled down to the first floor and flaring out in imitation of a historic French mansard. It’s goofy and garish, yet strangely endearing—pop architecture from an era that produced more delightfully bad buildings than perhaps any other period in American history.

The steep-sided mansard roof (named after François Mansart, a 17th-century French architect) is most commonly associated in this country with the so-called French Second Empire style of the mid-1800s. In Minnesota the trend was passé by about 1885, leaving behind such monuments as the Alexander Ramsey House (1872) near Irvine Park in St. Paul. But then came their sudden revival (for reasons that are hard to fathom) in the late 1960s. One possible reason for this rebirth: the flowing locks favored at the time inspired designers to offer an architectural equivalent in the form of buildings with long shingled hairdos.

What’s certain is that by the 1970s, mansard-mania was in full swing. Apartment buildings, offices and houses sprouted mansard roofs, the larger and more pretentious the better. Even McDonald’s, knowing a bad design trend when it saw one, stuck faux mansards on its restaurants in a misguided attempt to appear more refined. Eventually, of course, the architecture police intervened, and by the 1980s the epidemic had run its course.

Today, hundreds of these mansarded monsters remain in the Twin Cities as an enduring testament to, well, something or other. Those wishing to experience the joy of modern-day mansards can find prime examples in almost every corner of our metropolis. First- and second-ring suburbs, where much of the building stock dates to the 1960s and ’70s, are one of the mother lodes. They’re especially well-endowed with mansarded houses, a few of which reach truly delirious heights of kitsch.

South Minneapolis, however, may enjoy the highest concentration of large mansarded apartment buildings, such as the one on Emerson. I am not usually an activist when it comes to preservation, but if somebody out there with time to spare and no taste to speak of wants to lobby for the creation of the nation’s first Bad Mansard Roof Historic District right here in the Mill City, I might be willing to help with the paperwork.