The Austin River Arts District is an interdisciplinary project that grew out of the Minnesota Rural Design Lab’s mission to address the unique and persistent challenges facing communities situated at the interface of urban and rural. As a collaborative team of two architects and two landscape architects, our group proposed a new way of connecting the City’s growing arts community with an ecologically vibrant river corridor. Our site-specific design intervention at the historic Terp Ballroom serves as a gateway to the community’s most important asset, the Cedar River, while providing an ecologically-conscious method of flood mitigation.
