St. Paul architectural firm designs for the community and urban landscape
“Entrepreneurship is not for the faint of heart,” said James Garrett, Jr., a founding partner in the 12-person, St. Paul-based, Black architectural firm, 4RM+ULA. “Anyone who has the courage to step up and take it on—I have to tip my hat to them.”
Founded in 2002, Form+Urban Landscape Articulation or 4RM+ULA—pronounced ‘formula’—is involved in designing many of the projects and public spaces around the Twin Cities, including George Floyd Square, the 2800 Lake Street Project (the old U.S. Bank building), which the firm is co-developing with Seward Redesign, as well as open spaces and other community-development projects.
When asked about his favorite design, Garrett said, “In terms of projects that are in process, I would say, the George Floyd Square redesign. Just being a part of a process that looks to bridge community, public safety, public works, and basic services, and to find some kind of middle ground where people can feel seen and heard and protected, within the context of designing community space,” is one of the firm’s most important projects, he said.
“In terms of projects that are buildings, I would say the Juxtaposition Art Center in North Minneapolis,” Garrett said. “That building’s been a 15-year labor of love for me. We’re gonna have a big celebration when everything is done in July.”
Born in the U.S. Virgin Island of St. Thomas, Garrett moved to St. Paul—where his mother was from—at the age of one or two years old. He credits his parents with fostering his love of architecture.
“I wanted to be an architect probably since age five or six,” he recalled. “I started playing with Legos and Lincoln Logs, stacking anything that I could to build skyscrapers and make buildings with. It was just something that I was always drawn to.
“I got this notebook from my parents, and I started sketching and drawing. I was trying to teach myself how to draw perspective. I was drawing all the buildings in downtown Minneapolis and St. Paul, and adding my own futuristic buildings to the skylines.
“Later that year, my parents discovered the notebook, and they started going through it, and they were like, ‘This summer, we’re gonna go down to Chicago,’” he continued. “We went up to the Sears Tower and the John Hancock Center observation deck. On top of the observation deck of what’s now the Willis Tower, I thought, ‘There’s nothing better than this.’”
Garrett grew up in the Twin Cities, attended Chelsea Heights Elementary, Ramsey Junior High (now Hidden River Middle School), and graduated from St. Paul Central High School. After high school, he attended the University of California, Berkeley where he got a bachelor’s in architecture, and moved back to the Twin Cities, working for several different firms around town.
Later, he went to graduate school at Parsons School of Design, in New York City, where he got a master’s degree in architecture. Ultimately, Minnesota called him back, and he left New York to start a business in St. Paul.
Since starting his architectural firm, one of Garrett’s most important projects is one that is close to home for him and his 4RM+ULA partner Nathan Johnson.
“I’d say developing the Rondo Commemorative Plaza in St. Paul has been really important and cathartic in a lot of ways,” he said. “Both of my parents, my grandparents, and Nathan’s grandparents were all displaced from Rondo,” he noted, adding that Johnson is managing the project along with Lyssa Washington, the engagement coordinator and a project manager.
“We all lost property, land, and houses to the freeway. We lost part of our birthright in terms of what our families’ legacy would have been because of I-94. I’m very proud of that work that we’re doing,” he added.
“Being asked by the community to help them create a space that articulates that hurt and that pain, but also celebrates what has survived and what has thrived, and to create space for future generations,” Garrett said. “I think that is a really, powerful project that we’re really proud of.”
The focus on community—in particular Black and Brown communities—is what makes 4RM+ULA unique among architectural firms.
“We integrate public engagement, community engagement into all of our projects,” Garrett said. “We like to get to know not only the client, but also the community stakeholders—the community at-large. We want to create an intervention that’s going to serve everybody or be inspirational to everybody. You can’t know what people’s hopes and dreams and aspirations are unless you have those conversations, and you open up those lines of communication,” he said.
“I think I realized early on that in this industry, for me to be able to work on the types of projects that I was interested in, in the communities that I came from and that I was a part of [Black and Latino communities], I knew that at some point I was going to have to go my own direction because there’s nobody in the marketplace right now that was really paying any attention to those communities.
“Back then,” he recalled, “I was the one going to the community meetings. I was the one translating for people who were confused when the engineers, developers, or whoever on a big project went to the community and started to speak above people’s heads and use language that would get people confused,” he said.
“I’d have a secondary meeting after the first meeting to just explain to people, ‘Don’t worry about what he said with XYZ, what it really means is ABC,’” he added. “I started to realize that there was a niche in the marketplace that was absolutely not being served or respected. I felt like at some point I need to do something to try to fill that void. I think we’ve spent the last 20 years filling that void,” he continued.
“Oftentimes, when communities are neglected and disinvested there’s a sense of hopelessness or a sense that nice things aren’t for us,” Garrett said of his experience with communities of color. “What we’ve tried to do is to create things that were previously unimaginable.
“To make them accessible and within reach to people and organizations with fairly modest budgets, so that they can also experience world-class design and have spaces that cater to them, their children, and their families,” he continued.
“I hope that moving forward, we’re able to expand and do more. I think doing more than individual buildings—for example, designing a campus, open spaces, plazas, green space, and solar are what we want to do—designs that take up whole city blocks. Now, all of a sudden, it’s not just an individual building, but it’s a group of buildings working together to create this overall environment. And those are really the building blocks of communities.”
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