CedaRound: Kingston Square

Incorporated on the west side of the Cedar River as the town of Kingston in 1852 and annexed by Cedar Rapids in 1871, this long-neglected neighborhood is making a slow but gorgeous recovery after drowning in almost 10 feet of water in the 2008 flood.

 
There is a layered boxiness that visually links the architecture in the area, from the 1911 People's Bank Building designed by Louis Sullivan in his fortressy "jewel box" style to the post-war brutalist commercial spaces clad in corrugated concrete to the new mixed-use residential construction profiled with broad crenellations and proud cornices.

 
That boxiness creates a relentless horizontalness to the neighborhood's rooflines and setbacks, and someone somewhere in the neighborhood's recent revitalization decided to trace all that horizontal geometry with simple lines of bright white lights. And the effect at night is at once austere, majestic and stunning. So stunning, in fact, that I go out of my way to drive through the neighborhood every time I'm in the area at night. I've stopped and parked and wandered around with my iPhone a couple times to try and capture the magic, but I could never find the right spot to frame the full expanse of everything I find so beautiful.

 
But I finally captured it a year ago tonight when I discovered I was parked in an ideal location to capture most of it, which—since I've finally accepted that all that grand horizontalness is just too horizontal to squeeze into one picture—is still perfectly breathtaking.

The lights are a small touch, but they beautifully unify a relatively small neighborhood and help make it a smart district set along the river and embedded in our modest but friendly skyline.

CedaRound: Cedar Rapids History Center

The building that for a glorious moment was the architecturally contextual Cedar Rapids History Center was built in 1935 as a Quonset hut encased in industrially horizontal blond brick for the Rapids Chevrolet car dealership, and it stood resolutely as what seemed to be a permanent, demoralizing architectural stain on First Avenue at the edge of downtown until after I was out of college.

It was an exceptionally dreary example of early 20th century prefabricated architecture that was probably seen as austerely noble in its day and was unfortunately built to last well past its visual expiration date a decade later as the architectural world rediscovered the soul-nourishing properties of ornamentation.

So you can imagine how the city aesthetes rejoiced with great jubilation when the building started to be torn down in the 1990s, and then we waited with surprised but hopeful trepidation when we realized that what had brought devastating visual and emotional blight to the city for over half a century was not disappearing entirely but was instead being partially repurposed into delightfully contextual architecture: Ghosts of chipped-away pillars, arcs of corrugated metal and jagged geometries of pre-war brick suddenly stood with beauty, grace and a touch of fun as part of the endlessly clever new Cedar Rapids History Center building. And I quickly learned to stop sighing and looking away every time I drove past it. The new concept was quirky and invigorating and created a meaningful architectural dialogue between antiquated visual efficiencies and Post-Modern plays on scale, material and embellishment.

In 2017, the Cedar Rapids History Center moved to Cedar Rapids' historic 1896 Douglas Mansion—whose adjacent carriage house at 5 Turner Alley was transformed in the 1920s into an apartment and studio by American Gothic painter and Cedar Rapids homeboy Grant Wood—and the History Center building was renovated to become the new Cedar Rapids Day School. I'm kinda sad that the History Center abandoned its delightfully contextual hybrid-architecture home, but I still rejoice with civic pride every time I drive by it.