Minneapolis gets a taste of French style

When the Guthrie Theater chose French architect Jean Nouvel to design a new building along the Mississippi River, at least a few Minnesotans probably paused to wonder what the company had gotten itself into.

The Guthrie’s old thrust stage, a 1963 design by Ralph Rapson, might have been rickety and cramped, but it was beloved here. And Nouvel, who had never worked in America, was hardly a natural fit for Minneapolis. The city has a vital cultural scene but in general -- Prince notwithstanding -- doesn’t have much use for pretense.

Probably best known for his 1987 Institute of the Arab World in Paris, among the most successful of Francois Mitterrand’s Grands Projets for the French capital, Nouvel is given to statements about his work that are opaque and grandiose even by the standards of avant-garde architecture.

“From now on,” he declared last year in a manifesto written for the opening of a retrospective of his work at a Danish museum, “let architecture rediscover its aura in the inexpressible, in the cloudy.” He added that “architecture has to be impregnated and to impregnate.”

By the time the manifesto arrived in print, Nouvel had already informed Joe Dowling, the Guthrie’s Irish-born artistic director, and the board of trustees that he wanted to lift all three of the building’s new theaters at least four stories into the air. Oh, and cantilever a 175-foot-long “Endless Bridge” out toward the Mississippi. And add gigantic, ghostly portraits of actors and playwrights to the exterior and interior walls. And cover the entire facade with dark-blue panels, to evoke the magic of twilight -- or, as Nouvel insisted on calling that time of day, using a French idiom, “entre chien et loup,” the moment between the dog and the wolf.

Between the dog and the wolf and the Endless Bridge, the whole budget was pretty much spoken for by that point. Guthrie officials would have been forgiven for worrying that they were the impregnable ones, knocked up by a sweet-talking Frenchman with very expensive taste.

The surprise of the building, which opens to the public Sunday, is therefore not that its architectural symbolism, particularly the actors’ portraits, is labored -- which it is -- or that it proves also to be a practical design, even efficient in its way. The 60-year-old Nouvel, whose firm already has to its credit well-regarded performance venues in Lyon, France, and Lucerne, Switzerland, has a talent for solving knotty architectural problems with cleanly decisive architectural gestures, and for mixing luxe elements with bare-bones spaces.

What is surprising is that the pretension and the practicality merge to create a captivating building that is a singular presence on Nouvel’s resume, not to mention on the Minneapolis skyline.

If ever a building deserved to be called sexy-ugly, it’s this one. Somehow sleek and ungainly at the same time, a brooding, preening pile of geometric forms that could hardly be less photogenic, particularly on the outside, the design manages to slide naturally into its industrial riverbank context and feel utterly up-to-date. In a manner that is truly French, the fact that the building seems aware of its imperfections doesn’t keep it from exuding a palpable vanity.

Its completion caps off a mini-boom for the city’s cultural institutions, which began with a remarkable addition to the Walker Art Center by Herzog & de Meuron, which opened in April 2005, and has continued this spring with a pair of disappointing buildings: Cesar Pelli’s mall-like central library and an entirely forgettable new wing for the Minneapolis Institute of Arts by Michael Graves.

The Guthrie’s three excellent performance spaces -- an almost literal re-creation of Rapson’s hall that holds 1,100, a 700-seat proscenium theater with blood-red walls, and a black box at the very top of the building -- differ not only in size but in character, and give the Guthrie a programming flexibility it has never before enjoyed.

The site for the building is stunning and was clearly a lure, as well as an inspiration, for Nouvel. Built for $125 million, the Guthrie occupies a wide swath of land along the Mississippi, a few blocks northeast of the downtown core and just down-river from the churning St. Anthony Falls.

All around are bridges and hulking industrial buildings. Immediately to the west is an old flour mill, now a museum, that Walter Gropius included in “The Evolution of Modern Industrial Architecture,” an essay that helped fire Modern architects’ fascination with factories and grain elevators. Along with the river and the bridges behind it, the mill turns the Guthrie site into a perfect backdrop for Nouvel -- a kind of stage set for his own stab at theatricality.

The building is wrapped in metal panels that, at certain times of day, read as purple. (Prince again!) It is attached to a parking garage, which was designed by a local firm, by a windowless second-story bridge that is covered in the same panels. As you approach the front doors, you can see the undersides of the curving rows of seats that make up the thrust stage. Directly under that half-bowl are a series of billboards with pictures of famous playwrights and a large glass-walled restaurant.

The main entrance flows into an atrium space that is narrow and deep and rather plain, revealing, at the rear of the building, views of trees and a narrow slice of river. Two very long and very thin escalators lead up to a sky lobby that holds the Endless Bridge, with its remarkable views, along with bars, another restaurant and the entrances to the theaters.

It’s on your way up those escalators that the logic of Nouvel’s decision to lift the theaters so high in the air begins to make sense, even though it rather absurdly requires that the Guthrie find a way to get its sets and other stage equipment up there too. American theater companies have been trying for more than a decade to make their buildings not only auditoriums but destinations, to lure the public through the doors at times other than 10 minutes to 8 in the evening. In part they’ve begun to do so by taking a cue from museums and hiring well-known architects to produce iconic buildings. They’ve also added cafes and gift shops, introduced classes for children that will keep the building busy during the day, and varied their curtain times.

The Guthrie has done all of that in its new home, and indeed the building seems likely to attract plenty of people who come primarily to check out the architecture or meet for dinner in the ground-floor restaurant. But the danger of that arrangement, as Nouvel seems to understand, is that by inviting the city in you lose the sense of escape, of detachment from the everyday, that makes a trip to the theater appealing in the first place. By raising the theaters and connecting them to the lobby by slow-moving escalators, the architect not only preserves that detachment but makes it impressively literal.

And in the end there’s something refreshing about Nouvel’s insistence that architecture is, in some fundamental way, a poetic exercise. The field has grown not just practical but downright actuarial in the last couple of years, and not only when it comes to corporate projects. Rem Koolhaas still designs with a formally innovative, otherworldly touch, but he’s become obsessed with winning jobs by convincing his clients that his work is purely, bloodlessly rational. (Amazingly enough, they seem to be buying it.) Frank Gehry can’t have much time for creative contemplation now that he’s hashing out FARs and EIRs, and picking out bathroom fixtures, for his mega-projects in Los Angeles and Brooklyn.

Perhaps most disappointing of all, Daniel Libeskind, who won the ground zero master plan competition with rapturous rhetoric about death and rebirth, now spends his time building predictably eccentric condo towers for aspiring Trumps in places like Sacramento and suburban Cincinnati. So as long as Jean Nouvel is producing buildings as compellingly, humanely flawed as the Guthrie, we’ll forgive him the manifestos.