Curator’s Note – Renderings: The Summer Issue, 2026

Welcome to the first edition of Renderings, the newsletter of the Northwest Architectural Archives. We’ll publish three to four times a year as a way to share the work we are doing and how researchers use our collections.

I’m Cheryll Fong, Curator of the Northwest Architectural Archives and I hope you enjoy meeting our two talented archivists, our student staff, and the folks we partner with to accomplish their projects – whether it’s preservation, restoration, or researching a quirk of history, we are here to collect, preserve, steward, and make accessible, the history of our built (and unbuilt) environment.

Our hope is that this becomes a space where our community of learners, researchers, and creators who pour over records in our Wallin Center reading room, can share their experiences with each other. In doing so, we reveal the community hub that we are, which operates in the quiet of the reading room, each of you visiting on different days, often pressed for time to meet your deadlines. I hope you’ll see familiar names, meet new researchers looking into old questions, and most importantly, that we’ll be a community together, figuring out our future by understanding the past.

Our contributors are well known to most of you: First, Bill Beyer, FAIA, Emeritus, he is one of the architects who worked on the Elmer L. Andersen Library in which we are housed! Currently, he is also known for his work as an architectural historian, with articles in The St. Louis Park Historical Society Newsletter, the Hennepin History Museum, and the Ramsey County Historical Society Magazine. Adding journalistic gravitas to our effort is Frank Edgerton Martin, who has been published far and wide on the topics of architecture, design, and landscape architecture: The Star Tribune, Enter, The Architect’s Newspaper (international), Landscape Architecture, and much more.