Riverside Plaza (Minneapolis, Minn.)

Riverside Plaza is a modernist and brutalist apartment complex designed by Ralph Rapson that opened in Minneapolis, Minnesota in 1973. Situated on the edge of downtown Minneapolis in the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood, and next to both the University of Minnesota's West Bank and Augsburg University, the site contains the 39-story McKnight Building, the tallest structure outside of the city's central business district. Initially known as Cedar Square West, the complex was renamed when an investor group bought it out of receivership in 1988. Riverside Plaza is composed of six buildings and has 1,303 residential units, making it the main feature of the city's Cedar-Riverside neighborhood. The buildings form a series of landscaped courtyards, featuring fountains, a clock tower, terraces, playgrounds, and various other amenities. Each building has a different height, intended to reflect the diversity of its population. Rapson was inspired by the time he spent in European cities, where people of different ages and levels of wealth coexisted in close quarters. The area was developed with support from the U.S. federal government's New Town-In Town program, and was originally planned to be part of a utopian design that would have seen 12,500 units spread across four neighborhoods housing a total of 30,000 people. Cedar Square West was the first project in the country to receive Title VIII funds from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), and it is the larger of only two New Towns-In Town that ultimately qualified for that program.