The Maple Grove Town Green is a new model for place-making in rapidly growing suburbs. On this former gravelpit, Eric designed an open-air community band shell for music, dance, and theater under a dramatic concrete canopy. Three additional pavilions serve as gateways to a larger event area—offering concessions, restrooms and meeting space.

Challenge
Maple Grove is a rapidly growing suburb northwest of Minneapolis with a complete assortment of big box retail stores and much parking. Like many edge communities, Maple Grove had no center or downtown, but it did have a large gravel pit that served Twin Cities construction for decades. 

In the 19th century, Maple Grove was named for its location in the “Big Woods” of central Minnesota, an ecosystem that its founders soon eliminated. Now prime land for development, the gravel pit is filling in with a veneer of new housing, parks, and a new urbanist “downtown” with streets ending at the big box stores. 

Maple Grove’s site context is one where people drive to buildings—and buildings float in space surrounded by automotive infrastructure. How can design create a new civic identity in a place that never really had one?

Role
As design architect, Eric won the interview through discussing the threads of local character and stories that this new place could express. He led and participated in every phase of the project including: conceptual design, site planning, and creating solutions to break down the facility program into an enveloping collection of smaller pavilions.

Eric also led, design development, detailing, coordination of all disciplines, particularly structural engineering, construction administration and client contact.

Outcome: Revealing Nature
In designing the canopy structures, Eric drew inspiration from the fluid, wing-like form of the maple seed pod, the floating, spinning form beloved by children—and a reminder of the power and local need for ecological regeneration.

The band shell features a cantilevered, white-concrete canopy that gently arcs toward the sky in an acoustically formed shape. Eric designed the cast-in-place form to be richly colored and textured through a range of techniques

Rusticated, earthen, gravel-infused concrete base structures recall the stone extraction that exposed the regional aquifer now visible as ponds that frame the site. They house several functions including: stage left, stage right, concessions, toilets, and a conference space.