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On the third Saturday in October I was in Putrajaya, the newly
constructed capital city of Malaysia; on the fourth Saturday I
was in Topeka, the strangely desolate capital city of Kansas. It's
a toss-up which place I found more exotic. Topeka ultimately made
me happier-but then I like Kansas. I know it's a red state enemy
territory in an as-yet-undeclared civil war used by social critic
Thomas Frank as the symbol of everything wrong with American politics
in his book What's the Matter with Kansas? And New Yorkers still
write the state off as that dreary black-and-white dust bowl in
the Wizard of Oz.
But I was there to check out an art exhibit housed in the coolest
new building in Topeka (perhaps the only cool building in Topeka).
It wasn't a new museum designed by a name-brand architect, or even
a university library or government hall. It was just a ministorage
facility-the most beautiful ministorage facility I've ever seen.
And the work on display inside the corrugated metal-lined storage
bins was good art, heartfelt and well executed.
Flex Storage Systems was built by an enlightened developer, Diane
Botwin Alpert, and designed by a terrific architect, Josh Shelton,
of the Kansas City firm El Dorado Inc. Together they wanted to
create something that would alter the surrounding landscape and
reverse the flow of a decades-long downward spiral. The 128-unit
storage facility, which opened in April 2004, sits next door to
a glorified junkyard called Joyland and across the street from
an abandoned K-Mart store and a sad-sack business called Fresh
Start Auto Credit: Second Chance Finance. It's the first new commercial
development in the Highland Crest neighborhood in roughly 20 years.
The area lost its underpinnings when Forbes Air Force Base closed
down in the early 1970s, and the modest private homes there were
snapped up by real estate speculators who turned them into rentals.
Alpert's hope is that she can lease the adjacent site to a restaurant
and, bit by bit, restore the area's dignity and real estate values.
"Mixed-use will stabilize the neighborhood," she says. "But you
can't do retail until the area is stable."
In the diffused light of a slow Midwestern sunset, Shelton and
I walk around the building-a low rectangle topped by a giant, almost
heroic sloping shed roof. He lovingly describes every material,
every nook, every edge. While the architecture world is full of
practitioners who fetishize industrial materials and use them in
homes and stores, Shelton has applied those same materials to an
industrial project with the kind of obsessive attention to detail
that he'd employ for a residential project. "The structure and
roof comes from the VP Buildings Inc. catalog," he says. To the
standard-issue frame he's added a big expanse of translucent Polygal
to bring daylight into the facility, corrugated steel walls, and
corrugated garage doors in four rich, subtle colors. "Uniclad has
always been my favorite corrugated," Shelton says. "It's got curves
to it, not crimped at all." And then there are the details, like
a strip of light hidden in the soffit above the doors, the squishy
neoprene that seals the edges of the corrugated walls, and cedar
on the roof overhangs.
I'd met Shelton on a trip to Kansas a year earlier, and he'd been
sending me occasional progress reports on another one of Alpert's
Topeka projects, a low-income housing development she was hoping
to build in the same neighborhood. At the moment that project is
on hold. I had assumed Alpert was from Topeka, one of those anomalies
I meet occasionally-someone who is both civic-minded and has a
taste for good architecture. Alpert is actually a Kansas City attorney
who decided to take over management of the properties her father
(an expert neurosurgeon but amateur investor) had acquired over
the years. She is a surprising combination of chipper Midwesterner
and reflective Jewish intellectual. And her projects embody both
qualities: they are upbeat but exceptionally thoughtful.
Alpert took over her family's real estate holdings because she
figured it would give her more time to raise a family than her
corporate law job. But she found herself tending to a dying strip
mall. It didn't give her much pleasure and barely paid the taxes,
so she decided to replace the strip mall and commissioned a marketing
study. She learned that her best return on investment would not
be retail, for which she could charge $3 a square foot, but self-storage,
which would yield $12 a square foot.
While generally regarded as a safe investment, self-storage is
not a particularly glamorous business. There is something a little
unsavory about it. Storage units have lately doubled as meth labs,
and the Self Storage Association has posted an FBI memo on its
Web site explaining how to tell if one of your tenants is the next
Timothy McVeigh. But Alpert figured there was a way to transcend
all of that.
Before she turned her attention to her family's Topeka holdings,
Alpert had purchased and restored one building, a two-story commercial
structure in the Crossroads neighborhood of Kansas City, Missouri,
an area on the fringes of downtown that has emerged in the last
five years as a gallery and restaurant district. Alpert hired El
Dorado as her architect for renovation and worked closely with
Shelton, who gave the building a stripped-down postindustrial aesthetic.
"So I got a phone call from Diane," says Shelton over beer and
artichoke dip at a microbrewery in Lawrence, halfway between Kansas
City and Topeka. "She asked, 'What about doing a self-storage facility?'"
"I could hear the silence," Alpert says, continuing the story.
"But I said, 'Now, come on. You're always talking about the mundane
and about simplicity. Are you walking the walk or just talking
the talk?'"
How the art show, Moving In Moving Out, came about is harder to
explain. Apparently it was not one of those maneuvers where you
bring in art to pump up a property's cachet. (It's not likely art
would have that effect on a Topeka ministorage anyway.) It started
with Jim Woodfill, a Kansas City artist who often collaborates
with El Dorado. He was brought in to design the facility's sign,
an elegant type treatment using four signature garage-door colors.
Woodfill saw the sign as "this exercise in looking around the neighborhood."
Then a Kansas City curator, Hesse McGraw, took a look at Flex and
said it would be a great place to exhibit art.
The artworks housed in the Flex lobby and in a dozen of the storage
units (from October 22 to December 18) represent the artists' and
organizers' sincere efforts to understand and interpret the visual
culture of Topeka. Kansas City photographer Mike Sinclair was given
the task of shooting photos around Topeka that he posted, one a
day, on a Web site accessible to exhibit participants. The artworks
grew out of online discussions inspired by the photos. Sometimes
the connections are obvious: the ubiquitous flashing arrow signs
on Topeka's commercial strips turn up in several artworks and become
the unofficial icon of the exhibit.
While it's hard to say whether Topeka would voluntarily embrace
the flashing arrow as its symbol, or whether the exhibition has
anything to do with how Topeka sees itself, it's undeniable that
the developer and her collaborators are sincere in their affection
for and fascination with the city. And it's possible-although not
inevitable-that building a self-storage facility that has the accessible
elan of, say, Renzo Piano's Menil Collection in Houston, might
be a catalyst for similar gestures.
So in October I traveled to the other side of the world and back.
I visited Kuala Lumpur's Petronas Towers and the Malaysian prime
minister's office in Putrajaya (which looked like the sort of place
where the Wizard of Oz might hang his hat). But on my Saturday
night in Topeka, I landed in a bowling alley featured in one of
Mike Sinclair's photos. I drank Budweiser, ate a greasy burger,
and watched local teens hit Day-Glo bowling pins with fluorescent
orange bowling balls. At that moment I wasn't in a red state, or
a black-and-white state, but a polychromatic and complex state-and
I was sure that nothing was the matter with Kansas.
http://www.metropolismag.com/story/20050101/the-other-kansas
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