I found this rendering of 222 Hennepin earlier today, after reading Bill’s post on architecture. The part that I liked best is the traffic light. First it is sideways, a design that is used in some places in the world, but not Minneapolis, for a lot of good reasons.

I grew up in Columbia, Maryland, which for many years had sideways traffic lights, mainly as an architectural distinction, but which were abandoned because of the confusion created.

A major problem of such uncommon lights is that color-blind person might not know if the green is on the left or on the right. In Wisconsin (as everywhere else in the US where it is done, and standardized in the MUTCD, it is red on the left, green on the right.

In the rendering, it is the opposite.

It makes you wonder what other tricks and graphical shortcuts are going on to make the rendering desirable to approve and move into, but won’t really turn out as implied.