By wrecking Ralph Rapson’s Pillsbury house, Bill Cooper left state poorer

Not mentioned in the obits for Ralph Rapson — the man known as the father of modern architecture in Minnesota, who died last week — was the role of Bill Cooper, chairman of TCF Financial Corp. and the former chair of TCF Bank and of the Republican Party of Minnesota, in the destruction of one of Rapson’s greatest buildings.

The house Rapson designed for Eleanor and Philip Pillsbury Sr. on the Wayzata shores of Lake Minnetonka landed a coveted place on the cover of Architectural Record magazine when it was built in 1963. In 1990 the state architects’ group, AIA-MN, honored the house as a masterpiece that had stood the test of time. But late in 1996, Cooper bought the property and, according to Rapson, dismissed any notion of preserving it or adapting it with a simple message: “It’s not my cup of tea.” By February 1997, the house was gone even before it could be included on the list of the state’s Ten Most Endangered Historic Buildings. (Architecture students can study Rapson’s masterwork by CD-ROM virtual tour.)

Soon Cooper, by that time chair of the state GOP and a board member at the Center for the American Experiment, had built a new house where he hosted Republican fund-raisers featuring luminaries like George H.W. Bush. But in 2007, just 10 years after wrecking what a top Rapson scholar has called the architect’s greatest residential commission, Cooper cashed out the old Pillsbury property for $11 million, leaving Minnesota for income-tax-free Florida. Cooper’s decade on the lake likely made him financially richer; certainly he left Minnesota culturally poorer.