Note: In issue seven, we discussed the construction of landmark buildings, including an examination of the Bilbao Effect and its cousin, the starchitect phenomenon. The following is an examination of Minneapolis buildings and how they relate to these two trends in modern architecture.
In architecture, as in life, you will sometimes encounter hostility, cheeriness and hostility. Survey the landscape in any urban area and you will see, in built environment, a clash of styles, cultures, scales, histories … attitudes. The diversity is not inherently discordant or harmonious, but sometimes certain buildings stand out. Sometimes, these are structures are singular because they are refreshing, graceful and enduring designs that fit the geography and culture. And sometimes, buildings taunt.
Minneapolis has plenty of unremarkable buildings, and a handful of edifices that strive to be genuine architectural landmarks. Of the existing buildings that dot the landscape, there are three starchitect-designed buildings that are well-regarded by local architects and the broader community: Wells Fargo Center (1988), designed by Cesar Pelli; Philip Johnson’s IDS Center (1972); and the current Guthrie Theater, Ralph Rapson’s modernist masterpiece just west of downtown, which opened in 1963. One more, Frank Gehry’s Weisman Art Museum on the campus of the University of Minnesota, generates a more mixed reaction—to its critics, it is a giant, aluminum foil artichoke that blinds you as you drive across the Washington Avenue bridge; meanwhile, fans praise its flowing, molten forms that feel as organic as the river bluff on which it sits.
And now, a new generation of buildings arises, a fresh crop of ostensibly iconic edifices. These are the structures that their funders and creators hope will land on the cover of magazines, draw hordes of sketchpad- and camera-toting admirers, and stand as enduring, compelling legacies of the individuals responsible for their erection. In short, these are the Twin Cities’ own attempts to call in the starchitect cavalry to generate a Land of 10,000 Lakes version of the Bilbao Effect.
Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you:
One of the hottest architectural firms of the moment, Herzog & de Meuron won the Pritzker Prize – the highest honor in architecture – in 2001 and are known for constructing unusual forms using unusual materials. Their transformation of a former power plant along the Thames in London into the Tate Museum’s Gallery of Modern Art thrust them into the international spotlight and put them on the starchitect pedestal. The Walker project, also an urban art museum, abuts Hennepin Avenue, perhaps the most vibrant and important street in town. This is a laudable beginning – the current Walker, at the corner of Vineland and Hennepin, does all it can to ignore the pedestrians and cars outside, presenting a minimalist blank wall to Hennepin and an only marginally more inviting brick-and-glass façade to the Vineland and the Sculpture Garden on the other side. Adjoining the current museum and the new gallery space is a sprawling glass lobby that crouches along Hennepin, the rod connecting the two blocky weights of the old cube and the new … other shape. And what is that shape, exactly? Minneapolis designer Bob Roscoe, in an e-mail, called it “a piñata.”
Perhaps. As with new art museums in Denver, Bellevue (Washington), and elsewhere, the Walker addition is unapologetically angular, with a series of large windows placed about like gigantic confetti strewn into the air, but the whole thing is not so bold or asymmetric as to fit the label of abstract (or, to use realtors’ term for the vaguely strange, contemporary). In short, this is precisely the sort of building-as-art structure that one expects from starchitects; it is clearly a dynamic design, but not so singular as to become iconic, and in grave danger of both overshadowing and overwhelming the art within, both in terms of the sheer force of the building and the odd, potentially vertigo-inducing forms of the gallery spaces.
As for the firm’s trademark use of esoteric materials, their original plan was to cover the exterior in a translucent white Teflon, giving the illusion of a giant lantern, but large-scale mock-ups revealed that the approach was both unwieldy and unattractive – Star Tribune architect Linda Mack (no relation) commented in a recent article that it looked rather like the Metrodome turned on its side. Herzog & de Meuron have astutely changed their plans, replacing the Teflon with a series of perforated aluminum panels. This may help the new building avoid the new-but-already-dated foil that can arise when using new, untested materials, but whether the glowing quasi-cube will attract and enrapture patrons is, of course, a complete mystery until it opens.
The riverfront area of downtown Minneapolis is booming, with old warehouses becoming new lofts, the new Mill City Museum, a new park surrounding the ruins of old mills, and a bumper crop of cranes sowing rows and rows of quasi-historic townhomes and lofts. In the middle of it all, on a prime piece of riverfront property, is a particularly impressive construction site, the future home of the new Guthrie. The ongoing saga of the current Guthrie—which the adjoining Walker Art Museum wants to raze in favor of a park—is best left for a different article (but for a primer on the arguments for keeping the building, see SaveTheGuthrie.org). Still, it’s worth noting that many of those who favor the demolition of the current Guthrie claim that the building is merely a derivative, mediocre example of the Modernist aesthetic whose primary architectural merits lay in the original façade, which has now been replaced. That is, the Guthrie is nothing special.
Is the new Guthrie? Jean Nouvel’s design certainly offers a contrast to its surroundings, echoing neither the natural forms of the river and woods below nor the historic, simple brick buildings nearby. But, like the new Walker, the forms lack the abstract grace of Gehry’s Weisman or Bilbao Guggenheim, or the elegant, carefully arranged tapestry of interesting forms of Cesar Pelli’s new Minneapolis Central Library (more on this later). Instead of making use of a site wrought with potential, Nouvel squanders the opportunity with a cacophony of metals, glass and vibrant colors that overwhelms its subdued surroundings. In this regard, it is similar to Gehry's Experience Music Project in Seattle, although that building is at least in the confines of the amusement park-like Seattle Center, and looks less like a spaceship designed by a mid-1980s music video director and inelegantly grounded in a historic district. This is not the postcard-worthy, wedding photo backdrop that one would expect, even demand, for a world-renowned theater’s new home on one of the world’s great rivers.
The Guthrie, for its part, claims that it never really wanted an iconic building—in a Star Tribune article just after Nouvel unveiled his design, Guthrie board member Jay Cowles said that “We weren't asking Nouvel to build a beautiful piece of sculpture. We hired him to be sensitive to the site.” But does it? The Star Tribune’s Mack did not seem to think so in her original commentary on the design, noting the astonishing wasted potential of an ideal location: “Minneapolis—and this site—is ripe for an icon, a beautiful, sensuous building more inspired by the river itself than by what's on the river's edge.” Still, Mack went on to say that she appreciated the building’s mysterious, simple attributes, an opinion she has echoed in later pieces, and one shared by architect Nouvel, who said of the theater’s interior, “You won't be able to understand exactly what you're seeing.” Mack echoed this comment in her praise of the interior, calling it “mysterious and confounding.”
For $125 million, it’s an expensive conundrum, and one that, all things considered, does not engage the mind or appeal to the eye as the sensuous, genuinely mysterious forms of the Bilbao Guggenheim. One of the most perplexing aspects of the Guthrie on the Mississippi is the building’s primary attempt at truly bold design, a skyway-to-nowhere projection that extends 150 feet from the side of the building toward the river bluff. This will be an excellent spot to snap photos of the river gorge. But will the masses line up on the river bank, cameras pointed toward the new, awe-inspiring Guthrie? There is little doubt that theater fans will continue to support the Guthrie as it moves to the river; even if it were housed in a bunker, it would still be one of the most important and cherished cultural institutions in the Twin Cities. Even so, an institution and site of this caliber deserve a building far better than the one granted them by starchitect Nouvel. The new Guthrie could have been the exclamation point at the end of the riverfront’s rebirth. Instead, it’s a question mark, as in: How did they go so wrong?
With the bold-for-bold’s-sake edifices of the Walker addition and the new Guthrie flanking downtown Minneapolis, the new Central Library, right in the middle, could have completed a miniature Bermuda Triangle of jarring starchitecture. But Cesar Pelli, starchitect though he is, came through with an engaging design that will likely be the most functionally successful of the three. Pelli knows his territory; he may not be from Minneapolis, but he clearly knows how to design buildings for this locale, given the general admiration among Minneapolitans of his Wells Fargo Center, a skyscraper second only to the IDS in terms of height, and the early reaction to his designs for the new Central Library. The building offers enough dynamic flourishes—such as an angled, cantilevered roof jutting out from the central atrium and over the adjoining sidewalk—to satisfy those in search of compelling design, as well as an efficient, functional and rational floorplan. There has been some controversy over the abundance of glass—all that sunlight could do serious damage, over time, to the books—but Pelli has offered assurances that by using various opacities in the glass, the building will operate in service to the books and the comfort of the patrons.
Pelli’s design may be necessarily more egalitarian that the efforts of Nouvel or Herzog & de Meuron simply because it is a public library in the middle of the central business district. Even so, Pelli deserves credit for using local materials, listening to the needs of patrons and staffers, and considering the context of the surrounding buildings and streetscape; as designer Roscoe says, “Pelli is a starchitect who knows how to make a building elegant and also serviceable.”
There are other buildings that deserve scrutiny, briefly. Stephen Holl’s addition to the University of Minnesota’s Rapson Hall (home of the College of Architecture and Landscape Architecture) is a classic starchitect building: interesting materials, functionally suspect. Linda Mack and Bob Roscoe both praise its simple but compelling forms, but those who venture inside, particularly those who work or study within the new building, have almost universal scorn. Bob Mack, a professor at CALA (and, full disclosure, my father), laments that the exterior is a clichè and the interior is a cold, austere, uninviting space filled with quirky touches (including extra-wide doors with oddly-formed doorknobs) that made the project more expensive and less user-friendly; such complaints are apparently common, if generally off-the-record, among students and faculty. A few miles southwest, Michael Graves’s planned addition to the Children’s Theater Company and the Minneapolis Institute of Arts has drawn mixed reaction. The original CTC addition was slammed by critics as derivative, appallingly Disney-like and generally jarring when juxtaposed with the more formal, staid Institute of Arts building next door. Graves has since toned down the design, and offered a more Modernist-influenced aesthetic in his vision for the addition to the MIA.
None of these buildings will be the next Bilbao. A few years from now, some may be considered abject failures in terms of functionality, complete triumphs of design, a combination or something else entirely. To make a definitive assessment now is both unfair and rash. Still, even now these designs offer interestinAg lessons in the Bilbao Effect and the starchitect phenomenon, proof positive that cultural institutions and chambers of commerce demand big names and bold designs, now more than ever.
These trends would seem to indicate a long future for starchitects. But trends are ephemeral, and already there are signs that creative re-use, not bold new construction, may prove to be more of an asset to Minneapolis.
The Mill City Museum, in the shell of a former mill building partially destroyed by fire, offers striking design and interesting history. The renovation, by the local, non-starchitect firm of Meyer Scherer & Rockcastle, makes clever use of the existing building, incorporates interesting new design flourishes (such as a glass-walled elevator that offers both a history lesson and breathtaking postcard vistas at the top), and is, all told, a complex and successful combination of new and old. This is the glue that holds the riverfront district together, and as a striking building and an important document of Minneapolis history, it has the potential to be a genuine draw for tourists and locals alike. Seven months after its opening, it is already approaching iconic status. Starchitects likely could not have done better; Bob Roscoe surmises that they would have done far worse, and—gone for gonzo glory—maybe shrink-wrapping the stone in pink Lycra with long twisty steel reinforcing rods sticking out of it with a 70-story cactus sticking up from the middle of it (saying, ‘I'll show that Nouvel guy a sillier way to say, ‘Fuck you, Minneapolis!’).’ ”
The Mill City Museum may ultimately prove the merits of remembering history and hiring locals, thereby helping to calm the starchitect hysteria. Let Milwaukee and St. Louis have their architectural wonders of the Midwest (a new art museum addition and a giant arch, respectively); Minneapolis will thrive its history and its natural assets. As long as we preserve and enhance our existing jewels, we need not venture into the misguided and expensive realm of design savants and envy-inspiring Effects.
Doug Mack (doug@professoryeti.com) wants you to know that the Midtown Greenway will do more for Minneapolis than anything else he’s mentioned here. More on that some other time.
