The YES! House

By Miranda Moen

Rural advocacy and the power of creative people

The YES! House is a radically welcoming creative community gathering space that utilizes an artist-led community design-build process to engage residents in each step of the renovation process. — Ashley Hanson



Located in Granite Falls, Minn., in the southwestern region of the state, the project began in fall 2018 with initial community engagement and outreach phases. Construction began in late May 2020. When finished, the basement and first floors will serve the community as a multi-use space that accommodates co-working, pop-up business activity, public events such as theatrical performances, and other arts and cultural initiatives. The second floor is residentially programmed and will host the town’s first artist in residence, an annually appointed artist who will collaborate with the city on civic-related initiatives.

The YES! House project was built from an interdisciplinary team of artists, designers, and architects with the goal of addressing the lack of creative programming and amenities locally available to rural southwestern Minnesota residents. Using the design-build project delivery method, it accommodates the creative flexibility of an artist-led team and includes community members in each phase. Ultimately, the project was designed to be an adaptable model that small towns can utilize to integrate arts and culture initiatives in community and economic development.


Getting Her Start

The YES! House project was born out of years of advocacy work for and with rural communities in mind. While I started out as a designer on the project in May of 2019, owner Ashley Hanson began the work that led to this project years ago. With an educational background in social change and performance art, she started her career in the public art sector before deciding to shift her focus to rural arts initiatives.

In 2011, Patrick Moore, a community organizer, contacted her to create and perform a place-based play in Granite Falls (population 2,734). This was her first break as a rural community-based theater artist and would eventually lead to the co-founding of her theater company, PlaceBase Productions. She collaborated with playwright Andrew Gaylord to create “Granite Falls: A Meandering River Walk,” which spanned 11,000 years of history in just 45 minutes. Because of its success and the unique angle of the play, Hanson was promptly called back to create another for Granite Falls. From there, her work only expanded in its mission and outreach.

Following the 2016 presidential election, she began noticing the rift between urban and rural communities. Growing up in small-town Minnesota herself, she felt the need to become a cultural translator between the two, a role she had become familiar with throughout her career. In 2018, she founded a nonprofit cleverly titled Department of Public Transformation, an artist-led organization that emphasizes local partnerships and rural creativity in addressing community challenges. She then embarked on a 6,200-mile trek across 20 states to 24 towns with fewer than 10,000 people to connect with rural artists across the nation. In large part because of this work, she was one of 20 people selected in 2018 to become an inaugural Obama Fellow, pledging to further amplify rural voices.

At that time, the Department of Public Transformation’s mission expanded to connect rural artists by creating one of only a few artist-in-residence programs hosted by small-town governments. Of course, this started in Granite Falls. In her own words, “Granite Falls was the first town to say yes,” so she chose to give back when the opportunity arose to renovate a vacant downtown building that would serve as a creative hub and host the residency program. Later that year, a Granite Falls resident donated the building on Main Street that became the site for the YES! House project, and work commenced.

The YES! House: Innovation in Partnerships and Funding

The YES! House project has embraced unique, interdisciplinary teams since day one. The project was developed in collaboration with the Southwest Minnesota Housing Partnership (SWMHP), a nonprofit community development corporation serving 30 counties in the southwestern and south-central parts of the state. Funding for the project originated from the Partnership Art initiative, which sought to develop strong relationships and projects with the art and culture sector to better serve communities in southwestern Minnesota.

In 2015, the SWMHP was one of six organizations nationally that received funding through ArtPlace America to participate in the Community Development Investments (CDI) program for three years. This program provided funding and “technical assistance on conceiving, executing, and financing creative placemaking projects aimed at achieving their missions more effectively.” Ultimately, this provided the SWMHP the ability to distribute funding to the YES! House project with the goal of discovering what artist-led, community-oriented building looks like in practice.
Architect James Arentson of the SWMHP provided architectural and general project management services alongside Hanson to integrate the partners’ work into future phases of the project. While his primary work with the SWMHP centers on affordable housing and community development, Arentson’s role as the architect for the YES! House project also included community engagement and funding components.

Outside of these programs, Hanson has played the lead in overall fundraising efforts for the YES! House project. She launched a capital campaign in 2019 to find additional support for construction costs and used the training and resources she was given through the Obama Fellowship to assist in this endeavor.

The Process: Pre-Design, Community Research and Engagement Strategies

As owner of the building and founder of the project idea, Hanson works hard to thoughtfully engage the Granite Falls community. One way she does this is by spreading news and upcoming events hosted by the YES! House through social media to keep up the project’s momentum and the community’s morale. She is quick to point out, however, that many other people were instrumental in its development — a key source of her creative process and the project’s innovation.

To begin community engagement and outreach work, the multidisciplinary collective of artists and designers known as Homeboat was hired to facilitate and develop creative programming in collaboration with the Department of Public Transformation. Homeboat’s engagement process, known as Creative Community Design Build, a term coined by Homeboat, was deeply important to creating long-lasting relationships and trust within the Granite Falls community. This process began with an event known as Sundae Sunday in August 2018. Homeboat members met with residents to come up with strategies to re-activate the building as a community space. Other engagement events included Winter Warming House, which took place over the winter and piloted a series of events such as a casserole potluck, bingo night, wood workshops, game days, and drop-in social hours.

In March 2018, following an intensive one-week construction phase, Homeboat renovated the front space of the YES! House building. The following week, they offered a full calendar of day-and-night community programming. It was important that Hanson and other project partners could engage with residents in the actual space that would be transformed. This allowed community members to form a relationship with the building and its staff in advance of its official opening in addition to being a crucial step for future construction workshop engagement.

As part of the one-week renovation blitz, Homeboat developed a full-scale interior design of the space, including the project’s color palette, which was derived from the historic tile floor they uncovered during the renovation. They also built lightweight furniture and added place-inspired artistic touches such as an abstract mural depicting granite rock formations that give the town its name.

Homeboat’s implementation and the outcome of the CCDB process were documented by in-depth research reports which allowed stakeholders to understand the impact of an artist-led process. The report issued midway through their work detailed existing building parameters and offered programming and engagement strategies aligning with the YES! House’s mission. It also offered important precedents, ideas for generating income, and clearly stated desired outcomes and next steps. Their final report analyzed learning moments, summarized community feedback, and transparently shared project costs. Utilizing this work, the design team was then able to establish a focused project scope and quickly identify design strategies for the next phase. Without this research and outreach, I do not believe we would have had as much success gathering community support.



Design and Demo Phases: Architect, Artist, and Community Collaboration

After the initial community engagement events wrapped up in May 2019, I was brought onto the team to work alongside Arentson, the architect, to help develop a design concept and renovation approach for the building. After thorough as-built documentation, we utilized Homeboat’s community engagement reports to quickly develop initial design schemes and programming solutions for the project’s scope and the amenities it sought to provide. This work resulted in presentation drawings and a 3D-model video walkthrough showcasing early design concepts and programming ideas for the YES! House. These were unveiled to the Granite Falls community at the Design Shareback event hosted at the YES! House in November 2019.

We hosted another event to meet with regional contractors and tradespeople to get to know local professionals we could work with and bring onto the project during construction. We learned it was deeply important to meet with contractors in person and establish relationships early on to build trust with local stakeholders. Architects and designers who are not locally based are almost always perceived as outsiders, and the stereotype of the “starchitect” often prevails if not dispelled early on. When working in rural communities, it is incredibly important to show that you, as a designer or architect, are committed to serving the community’s specific needs and providing a design solution that is not simply a cut-and-paste from an urban community — a common mistake when firms transition to rural work. People want place-based work, as a symbol that you hear their concerns and care about their needs.

In late February 2020, Hanson organized a demolition workshop led by the general contractor that invited community members to take part in the process and learn basic demo skills. Free lunch was provided, and almost all of the demolition required to move forward was completed in four hours.



COVID-19 halted some of our progress as we headed into March, but our team forged ahead with design while taking precautions and shifting project deadlines as required. We are now fully engaged in the design-build construction process, with plans to reschedule our planned framing and drywall workshop offered to community members later in the year. In addition, our fundraising period was disrupted by the pandemic, so our construction timeline has been expanded, and our focus is now primarily on preparing the second floor to be livable spaces by October, the move-in time planned for our city artist in residence.

Despite the natural belief that a community-sourced and -fundraised project would be shattered in light of the pandemic, the YES! House continues forward. This is in large part because so many people are involved and believe in its mission. At this point, community members, council members, Granite Falls administrators, and even the mayor have been involved for years. We have garnered the attention of community members and plan to buy as local as possible, in addition to employing local tradespeople. Without this support and the belief in the goal of having a community space that enhances local amenities and drives economic growth, the project probably would have sunk by now. This shows the power of creative people and the value of investing in art and design for all project scales.

Conclusion

As a young designer, it has been a dream to work on a project that seeks to revitalize small towns alongside artists through the celebration of rural culture, people, and places. Rural artists understand so well the struggle of rural architects and designers. I have found such a great community by intertwining my practice with artists who focus on rural spaces and community development. We are often practitioners with very limited resources — financial and otherwise. It’s hard to find camaraderie within an industry that does not often showcase meaningful work being done in rural areas.
We (rural designers and artists) are small pockets within vast landscapes and between metropolitan areas. Spreading the word about our work is often challenging, with few organizations that champion rural voices and concerns. We must therefore engage in this work in ways that differ from what we have been taught by traditional education and conventional practices. I’m glad arts-based collaboration is being used more and more, but on the whole, we in the architecture and community development sectors need to do better. It is my intent to share this project as just one case study that brings together stakeholders in multidisciplinary collaboration, working toward the common goal of serving the underrepresented and underserved. We, as creatives, have the power to take on meaningful projects that extend far beyond just one client. All it takes is a little dreaming and the support of a village — luckily, there are many to go around.

Author Bio:

Miranda Moen
Moen is passionate about rural design and cultural heritage research, working with rural artists, economic development leaders, and private clients in Southern Minnesota and Northern Iowa.