Box of surprises

Since 1971, the Walker Art Center has been housed in a boxy, nearly windowless building of dark brick designed by Edward Larrabee Barnes. Austere and a bit fortress-like -- though with a remarkable attention to detail inside -- it’s a museum that residents of the Twin Cities have long appreciated but only an architect could truly love.

That may explain the surprising deference to Barnes that Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron display in their otherwise virtuosic extension of the Walker, which opens Sunday.

The $70-million project, which doubles the museum’s total square footage to 260,000, is the first major U.S. design by the Swiss architects, who met in kindergarten, studied architecture in Zurich with Aldo Rossi and others, and founded a practice together in 1978. Their fantastically busy firm, which now employs a staff of 200, is also designing the new De Young Museum in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, to be finished in October.

Given their reputation as trailblazers -- albeit ones with a rigorous Swiss aesthetic -- it comes as something of a shock to see Herzog and De Meuron mimicking and even channeling Barnes in certain sections of the new Walker interior. The brick that runs underfoot in the lobbies and other public areas in the new wing, for example, is an exact copy of the material that Barnes used to cloak his museum and line its corkscrew-shaped interior stair. And the floors of the new galleries use the very same white terrazzo that Barnes did for his.

Indeed, in their cool precision, the Walker’s new galleries are arguably more conservative than the originals -- and surprisingly reminiscent of the ones Yoshio Taniguchi designed, at a significantly higher budget and larger scale, for the new Museum of Modern Art in New York. (Along with Bernard Tschumi, Herzog and De Meuron were finalists for the MoMA job.)

But museums, the new Walker argues, can hardly live on restraint or perfectionism alone. In nearly every space where painting and sculpture are not shown -- and all that brick flooring notwithstanding -- the scheme is as about as aggressively up-to-date as it could possibly be, thumbing its nose at right angles and Taniguchi-style discretion.

On the exterior, for example, the design shows no interest in being polite to Barnes’ original. Seen from Hennepin Avenue, the busy six-lane street along which Herzog and De Meuron’s wing extends, the new Walker looms like an otherworldly presence. Its five-story tower, connected to the tower of Barnes’ older building by a two-story wing, is shaped like a kinked and warped box and sheathed in a skin of crumpled aluminum panels.

The box cantilevers over a new entrance, which leads to a gift shop, low-ceilinged lobby and sloping indoor street that runs along Hennepin, opening up views of the skyline of downtown Minneapolis, about a mile away. Around back, a second phase of the expansion, due to be completed next year, will demolish a section of the Barnes building and the adjacent Guthrie Theater and enlarge the Walker’s sculpture garden. A new Guthrie, designed by the French architect Jean Nouvel, is under construction downtown.

The crumpled panels cover the Walker’s new tower nearly as completely as Barnes’ brick does the old one; they are interrupted only by two sizable and eccentrically shaped windows, one in the second-floor restaurant (operated by Wolfgang Puck) and the other in a special events space on the top floor. Most of the box is taken up by a 385-seat theater, whose pride of place in the design suggests how central the performing arts have always been in the Walker’s mission.

The museum’s skin isn’t as stunning as some others by Herzog and De Meuron, who are famous for treating exterior materials in unorthodox and sometime sublime ways. (It can’t match the surprising power of the stone facade of the Dominus Winery in the Napa Valley, for example.) But it manages to engage the Barnes facade, which has until now been resolutely mute, in a dynamic architectural dialogue.

Inside, the design shows a fluidity that the architects first explored in earnest in a gem-like Prada store in Tokyo, which opened in 2003. It is handled even more assuredly here, with lobbies, hallways and public areas flowing together in broad rivers, narrow tributaries and intimate eddies of interior space.

After spending most of their career producing refined, exquisitely clad boxes, beginning with the Ricola warehouse in Laufen, Switzerland, in 1987 and culminating five years ago in the massive spaces of the Tate Modern in London, Herzog & De Meuron have lately exhibited a growing impatience with the confines of regular geometry.

That shift is very much in evidence in the highest-profile project in the firm’s office right now, a design for the Olympic Stadium for the 2008 Summer Games in Beijing. The structure of the stadium will be provided by an innovative tangle of concrete piers. In Beijing, the design is known as the “bird’s nest.”

At the Walker, Herzog and De Meuron -- working with a partner in the firm, Christine Binswanger, and Minneapolis architects Hammel, Green & Abrahamson -- have taken a similar approach: beginning with a regular box of space, in this case a gallery instead of an athletic field, and giving it an eccentrically shaped wrapper.

In essence, the design is a bold attempt to operate simultaneously at the two poles of recent museum architecture. At its core, the design is marked by the quietude, even the rectitude, of a museum by Renzo Piano or Taniguchi. Around the edges, it approaches the free-flowing expressionism of museum architecture by Frank Gehry, Steven Holl and Santiago Calatrava.

In a few places, Herzog and De Meuron’s design for the Walker is not just contemporary but edges toward trendiness, a quality that marks a real departure for architects who made their reputation with work that aimed so directly for the timeless and elemental.

This is true, first of all, in the Walker’s lighting design, by Arnold Chan, who is best known for his work with Ian Schrager and has provided the museum with the sort of discreetly chic illumination you’d sooner associate with a hotel than a place for looking at art.

It is even more true when it comes to Herzog and De Meuron’s use of decorative ornament. The architects have taken a swirling lace pattern, blown it up to almost cartoonish proportions and then used it, in various colors and materials, to cover the thresholds to the galleries, the walls of the theater and even the concrete entrance gate to the underground parking garage.

In their new interest in carefully controlled blasts of decoration, Herzog and De Meuron are following the lead of furniture designers such as Patricia Urquiola as well as architects such as Gehry (in his Walt Disney Concert Hall upholstery) and Rem Koolhaas (in his interiors for the Central Library in Seattle and the student center at the Illinois Institute of Technology).

The Walker suggests that the thus far tentative decorative revival in architecture -- call it ornament creep -- is growing bolder. But because decoration is now being used with a good deal more wry restraint and less empty irony than it was during the first flowering of postmodernism -- and because it continues to offer such a refreshing antidote to the predictable, airless quality of the luxe minimalism of the 1990s -- it is cause for enthusiasm more than worry.

The approach seems most effective when it pairs, as it does here, sleek, ornament-free exteriors with bold decoration in limited sections of the interior. That tension is the key to the Walker’s newfound vitality. The theater, in particular, with its black-on-black wall designs in embossed aluminum, is a marvelous example of how figurative pattern can be deployed to create dark intrigue instead of sunny nostalgia.

It will be fascinating to judge the results, though, when a prominent architect grows bold enough to put ornament back on a facade, where it is still pretty much taboo. For all their architectural daring, Herzog and De Meuron still weren’t willing to go that far in Minneapolis.