Clarence Johnston designed more buildings and created a broader range of urban environments than any other figure in Minnesota’s history. A boyhood friend of Cass Gilbert, he helped to introduce the Richardsonian Romanesque and Shingle styles to the streets and suburbs of St. Paul. His lingering fondness for Gothicism and its Queen Anne offshoots slowed his embrace of neoclassicism, but once the latter occurred, an extraordinary outpouring of designs followed. Scattered throughout the state, his forays into the Roman Renaissance and the Colonial period in America stood at the zenith of the state’s encounter with what came to be known as the American Renaissance.

While Gilbert moved on to New York and national fame, Johnston stayed home to become the most sought-after residential architect for two generations of St. Paul’s upper classes. Forty-two of his designs were implanted on Summit Avenue, one of the most famous and best-preserved Victorian boulevards in America. For thirty years he also served as Minnesota State Architect, designing virtually all the buildings on thirty-five state-owned sites and campuses. Bringing him widespread recognition, such institutional complexes as Stillwater State Prison, the State Home School for Girls, the Northwest Agricultural Experiment Station, and Gillette State Hospital for Crippled Children immediately became models of their types throughout the nation.

Johnston’s practice spanned fifty-four years, from the establishment of his St. Paul office in 1882 to his death in 1936. During that period he mastered an enormous range of design types, ultimately coming to regard historical styles as reflections of programming needs and physical context rather than expressions of personal taste—either his own or his client’s. One of the hallmarks of his work was its deep sense of humanism, indicated both by his emphasis on long-term functional and structural viability and by his installation of ornamental programs specifically suited to the building’s uses. Perhaps his rarest gift was the ability to ennoble a governmental office incessantly subject to bureaucratic tinkering and political manipulation with a generation’s worth of thoroughly and intelligently planned buildings. As one of his contemporaries put it, "Time has demonstrated that the patient insistence with which he forced certain convictions often caused his clients to build better than they knew."

Cover illustration: Manhattan Building, rendering by Eldon Deane, 1890, Courtesy of John E. Blomquist. Paul Clifford Larson is an independent historian practicing in the Twin Cities. Long interested in the architecture of the Upper Midwest, he has organized nationally touring exhibits on the influence of H.H. Richardson and Frank Lloyd Wright. His books include Municipal Monuments and The Spirit of H.H. Richardson on the Midland Prairies. Following a recent stint as director of the Gardner Museum of Architecture and Design in Quincy, Illinois, Larson now lives in St. Paul with his wife Pamela and son Griffin.

Back to Architecture