Is the IDS Center really Minnesota’s tallest building?

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Minneapolis has one of the most impressive skylines in the Midwest, with two buildings rising above the others: IDS Center and Capella Tower.

Which one is taller? It turns out to be quite close — close enough that it was once the subject of much public debate.

But IDS Center holds the title, partly out of respect for the building’s important role in the city’s history.

Chris Bovitz was wondering about Minneapolis’ skyline recently as he took in the view of downtown from Interstate 35 while driving north from his Lakeville home.

“I’ve heard that, by law, no building can be taller than the IDS Center. Is that a law?” he asked Curious Minnesota, the Strib’s reader-powered reporting project.

The short answer: No, there’s no law or ordinance requiring buildings be shorter than the 57-story skyscraper at 80 S. 8th St.

Instead, as downtown’s skyline filled in, an overabundance of Minnesota Nice modesty kept architects and developers from trying to go higher. They honored IDS’ place as “queen of the skyline,” said former Star Tribune architecture critic Linda Mack.

“It was just ... this is the way we do things in Minneapolis,” she said. “And so when the Wells Fargo Center was designed by César Pelli, there was just no question that it would be a bit shorter than IDS.”

For a time, broadcasters counting on a clear signal also lobbied for any new buildings to stay below the 1972 tower.

But while architecture databases, building owners and the state’s tourism board all continue to list the IDS Center as the state’s tallest, today the distinction is a little mushy.

That’s because when the 776-foot Capella Tower went up in 1992, builders secretly ended up extending the skyscraper’s halo-like crown higher than planned, above the height of the IDS Center’s main roof.

“Everybody assumes IDS is the tallest building,” Mack said. “But if you think about it, it really isn’t.”

When Philip Johnson landed the IDS Center commission in 1967, it was his “first true skyscraper,” Mark Lamster wrote in his biography of the architect, “The Man in the Glass House.”

Johnson went on to become an influential, pioneering “starchitect.” A household name with a building in nearly every American city, he was also controversial and contradictory — a former Nazi sympathizer who designed a synagogue for free.

IDS Center towered over the other buildings in Minneapolis’ skyline when it went up, rising to 775 feet when it opened in 1972. That was 328 feet taller than the Foshay Tower, which had spent nearly half a century as the city’s tallest landmark.

IDS’ glass curtain-wall tower design was especially clever, said Tom Fisher, director of the Minnesota Design Center at the University of Minnesota. “Its sawtooth floor plan provides many corner offices for the professional tenants occupying the building,” he said.

“But its greatest achievement was the Crystal Court at the tower’s base, which provides an enclosed, light-filled public space for the people of Minneapolis to gather,” Fisher said. “Lacking a large park in the center of the downtown, Crystal Court is Minneapolis’s Central Park.”

Johnson himself said that after his building was added to Minneapolis, “there’s more of a there, there now,” Lamster wrote.

In 1973, TV’s “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” added shots of the new landmark to its opening credits. As “Love is All Around” plays, building up to Moore’s signature beret toss, the camera lingers on the IDS Center’s zigzag storefronts and bright interior courtyard.

Seven years after it opened, the tower’s owners added a 16-foot-tall window washing penthouse to the top of the building. This boxlike structure on top of the roof would later play a key role in what Star Tribune columnist Nick Coleman once called the “tiresome issue of Who Is Biggest.”

When architects Pei Cobb Freed & Partners and owners revealed plans for Capella Tower (then called First Bank Place) in 1989, they said it would rise 774 feet tall.

“There was a big point made at the press conference that, you know, ‘No, we would not go higher than IDS,’” said Mack, the former Star Tribune critic.

(Today, the Capella Tower complex includes the Minnesota Star Tribune.)

For more than a decade after Capella opened, 774 feet was its official height. But it wasn’t true.

In 2005, Mack learned the full story from one of the building’s project managers, which she revealed in a front page article.

When the building was going up, project managers realized that the large mechanical ducts they were putting inside the tower’s crown area were too large for the space. They would have to extend the vertical steel supports.

They decided to extend them a full 2 feet, Tom O’Mara, the manager who was Mack’s source, said in a recent interview.

Then they realized that would put them at 776 feet tall — 1 foot above IDS.

“Then somebody said, ‘No, this is not good,’” said O’Mara, who is now retired.

“And I go, ‘Well, what are we supposed to do?’”

Higher they went.

While O’Mara and others working on Capella Tower couldn’t help but be pleased that their building had become the city’s tallest, they largely kept it under wraps, he said.

Still, the true height was shared as “sort of an underground legend in the architectural community,” Mack said.

After her story appeared, the IDS Center’s owners countered that the building’s 16-foot window-washing penthouse (which appears like a little box on top of the skyscraper’s main roof) actually made it 792 feet tall.

These days, O’Mara finds the whole thing funny.

“That wasn’t original to the building,” he said. “But if they want to count that as making it taller than Capella Tower, fine.”

In more recent years, the unspoken rule of respecting the skyline’s “queen” hasn’t been a factor.

Shifting commercial construction trends and economic realities have eliminated the need for sky-high office buildings.

“The demand for large, multi-tenant office buildings changed in the 1990s,” said Fisher. “Instead, we started to see more single-tenant, owner-occupied buildings — Ameriprise, Thrivent, Target — that did not need as much floor space and so their buildings did not need to be as tall as IDS and Capella. That trend continues to this day.”

In 2022, Minneapolis' skyline gained the 37-story RBC Gateway tower — which houses the Four Seasons Hotel and residential condos as well as offices.

But downtown discussion lately has centered more on converting office buildings to other uses or even demolishing towers amid high vacancy rates.

“With the shift in how people work in the wake of the pandemic, I doubt we will see any more tall buildings,” Fisher said. “Or, if we do, they will more likely be residential rather than commercial buildings.”

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