Warning! Subjective statements about architecture ahead.

We’re in the midst of a multi-family building boom in the Twin Cities. Thousands of new units have been built in the past couple years, and the next couple years will see at least as many. This is great news–maybe all those Style section trendpieces about “the new urban lifestyle” are finally starting to come true?

Among all the cranes, however, some complaints have surfaced. There’s a bit of monotony to the boom. Almost every new project in Minneapolis has followed the same formula: A couple levels of underground parking, a concrete ground floor, and four to six stories of stick-frame construction. And they’re pretty much all half-block rectangles. I, personally, don’t see any inherent problem with that–pretty sure London and Paris are filled with five to seven story buildings, and no one complains about them being cowtowns.

But I do have some constructive criticism about one thing. The individual air conditioning units that pockmark the sides of all the new low-rises. They’re commonly known as Magic Paks, though that appears to be a specific company, so I’ll refer to them generally.

At some point, somebody pointed them out to me, probably on UrbanMSP, and now I always immediately notice them whenever I look at a building. They’ve been around for a while. Minnesota gets hot in the summer! Damn hot. Especially in the upper levels of a multi-story building in a south-facing unit in August.

They’re very common in that typical, shabby, two or three story 60s-/70s-/80s-era walk-up apartment you see all over the city, as well as in the public housing high-rises that were built in the same time period.

As far as I can tell by analyzing the construction fossil record (i.e. looking around) there was a bit of a break in the trend, and lots of new stuff went up from sometime in the 80s until the mid-aughts with central A/C systems. But we’re back to individual units now. The style now isn’t an A/C unit hanging out the side of the building like in the picture above, instead they’re inset flush with the wall of the building. Which, in theory, should look a little more graceful, except when an A/C unit accumulates moisture (when they’re on) and is made out of metal (which they are) and then this starts to happen:

And that’s no good. That’s a pretty egregious example, usually they don’t get quite that bad–though this is an older building (2002!) and could potentially be a sign of things to come with some of the lighter-colored facades. Someone should probably buy them some CLR. There’s also a pretty basic but, again, subjective point you could make about them: They’re usually ugly, and further clutter up building facades that are, lately, already pretty cluttered. I would imagine that most people probably don’t even notice them unless they’ve got the rust streaks hanging down, but awkwardly-spaced rectangles on a building facade are probably part of why you might look at the building and express your vague displeasure with it.

I talked to a fellow who works for a local developer to try get a little background about why they prefer the individual units to a central system, and as I’m sure you can imagine, they’re significantly cheaper. It would vary by project, but in an average new building, installing a full central A/C system is about twice as expensive up front as giving each unit their own A/C. Taller buildings (those over that six or seven story height where concrete construction is required) will generally have a central system, but in this city we’re not anywhere near the point where it’s economical to build lots and lots of 40 story apartment towers–low-rises will be the norm for a while.

So, understanding that developers aren’t in this for fun and that they need to pay the bills, what are some other solutions? There are definitely projects that do a better job hiding the units than others.

That’s The Elysian, a project on 4th Street Southeast near the University of Minnesota. The A/C units are tucked into the balconies on the side facing 4th Street Southeast. Unfortunately they aren’t entirely concealed on the 8th Avenue Southeast side, even though it would have been so easy to just turn them 90 degrees, but it’s still a huge improvement aesthetically. It’d also be great, where possible, to put them on the inside of interior courtyards or on the alley sides of buildings.

In particular, minimizing that rust drip would probably be pretty easy from an engineering (or at least maintenance) standpoint. Even though many are quickly sold to third parties, we’ll have to live with these buildings for decades. Going forward, I would hope that architects and developers keep the long-term appearance of their projects in mind.