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Midwest Home /  March 2008 /  Designs for Living

Designs for Living

Todd Hansen unites modern function with classical forms

It’s not happenstance that the smallest details loom large in the work of this year’s Emerging Talent winner, Todd Hansen, AIA. Even as a teenager growing up in St. Paul during the 1970s—a period of design blight almost uniformly considered hilarious and horrific—Hansen remembers thinking, Boy, this stuff is ugly. He also wondered why. “When things can be so beautiful,” he says, “why is so much of what people come in daily contact with so thoughtlessly produced?”

From then on, Hansen sought to discover how he could change people’s relationship with the objects and places they encounter in daily life. In high school, he made clothing and studied graphic design. His objective: “to figure out how to make the world a more beautiful and life-sustaining place.” While earning his undergraduate degree from Hampshire College in Massachusetts, he took a year off to work in a restaurant, with an eye toward chef school. “I remember the pleasure of getting the perfect dice of carrots, onions, and fennel to fit into a shell with a mussel,” he recalls. “I’ve always been acutely sensitive to visual details.”

Instead of continuing on the culinary route, Hansen finished college with a degree in architectural studies. He went on to earn a master’s in architecture from the University of Pennsylvania in 1991. The young architect moved back to Minnesota and worked for a commercial firm in St. Paul, as well as TEA2 and YA Architects in Minneapolis before joining a firm that was newly founded by his wife, architect Christine Albertsson.

Hansen is known for his painstaking attention to detail. For example, he recently designed many intricate features for a Cannon Falls house: an apothecary cabinet embedded in a wall, a pantry filled with drawers that cushion each piece of the homeowner’s fine tableware, and more than 30 detailed pieces of millwork he articulated for different areas of the house. Also consider the house as a whole: Sensitively sited on a narrow ridge, the house looks fresh and contemporary, but also feels as though it’s always been there.

Hansen achieved exactly what the homeowner had in mind. “When I was growing up, my parents had a ramshackle cabin on Lake Pepin, with lots of painted woodwork and beadboard,” the homeowner says. “What I really wanted in my new home was that cabin where I spent my summers, but it needed to be bigger, much more sophisticated, and cleaner in design.” She interviewed several architects for the project, she says, but chose Hansen because he could “articulate, with specificity and detail, how he would begin the design process and how he would arrive at the final outcome.” She was also attracted to Hansen’s “clean and warm style” that transforms the classical architectural vocabulary of America’s past—the simple elegance of Shaker furniture and Colonial forms—into contemporary architecture that addresses the requirements of twenty-first-century life.

“What I learned while studying at Penn was that architecture is a set of ideas that meets human needs in built form through time,” Hansen says. “I don’t feel at odds with history, but I don’t feel tied to it either.”

For another project, a modern speculative house in Mendota, Hansen created a warm living space by bringing in lots of light through clerestory windows, and by incorporating built-in cabinetry and millwork. He also tucked necessities, such as a laundry room and pantry, behind a door in the kitchen to maintain the home’s open, modern aesthetic without eliminating any functions. Hansen believes that “architectural intention can be expressed at every level, from initial siting to millwork details.”

Hansen says the professional partnership between him and Albertsson has evolved naturally, since the two share a timeless but modern sensibility. “Many people today live modern lives in old houses,” Hansen says. “They’re looking for an interpretation of the past that fits a modern sensibility.” Given his lifelong desire to beautify everyday objects, Hansen can surely supply one that works.

Camille LeFevre is a St. Paul writer.

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