Curtain Up!

By Richard Lacayo/Minneapolis

Jean Nouvel is standing in midair with his arms held high. O.K., he's not really in midair. He's standing on a window. Well, not exactly a window. It's a 5-ft. by 10-ft. plate of glass that's set into the floor of a long corridor of his new Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, Minn. It's the corridor that's in midair. Actually, it's not simply a corridor. It's more a kind of covered bridge to nowhere that cantilevers 178 ft. across and 60 ft. above the city's West River Parkway. And then there's the other window, the mirrored one. But we'll get to that later.

By now you will have begun to understand that Nouvel's buildings can be hard to pin down. His name is one variant of the French word for new, and he does his best to live up to it. He likes to upend old notions of inside and out, solid and porous, to say nothing of where windows should be or how comfortable you should feel about standing on one over a 60-ft. drop. What Nouvel is doing with his arms over his head is making a little joke about floating in space, but he looks more as though he were about to take flight. And as it happens, he probably is.

For two decades Nouvel, 60, who is based in Paris, has been one of the world's best-known and most closely followed architects. But he's a latecomer to the U.S. After a number of false starts and canceled projects, the Guthrie will be his first completed U.S. commission. (His second, a condo building in New York City, opens later this year.) Although stage productions won't begin until next month, the new Guthrie has its gala opening on June 25.

What the inaugural visitors will come upon is an ingenious stage production in itself. A building that looks at times to be a castle keep, bunkered and enclosed, turns out to be an enchanted castle, full of witty gestures and brilliant sleights of hand. Nouvel knows that this indigo metal box is a very visible commission, and not just because it's located on a high bank of the Mississippi. From the time it was established in 1963 by Tyrone Guthrie, the legendary British director, the Guthrie has been one of the most prestigious regional theaters in the U.S. And in the past two years, Minneapolis has abruptly emerged as a hotbed of high-profile architecture. The Minneapolis Institute of Arts has just added a stately new annex by Michael Graves. Last month the city opened a fascinating new public library by Cesar Pelli. Both of those came on the heels of Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron's intricate addition to the Walker Art Center. If Mary Tyler Moore were still throwing her hat in the air, it would be hard for her not to hit a major design statement.

The original Guthrie Theater, a 1963 structure by a Minneapolis architect, Ralph Rapson, happens to be next door to the Walker, which owns it and plans to tear it down soon to make way for a four-acre sculpture garden. The old theater's signal feature is its thrust stage, an innovation at the time, which juts into the orchestra section like a runway. Although inventive thrust staging became the signature of Guthrie directors--what else could they do?--there were times when they would have preferred a conventional proscenium. In the late 1990s, Joe Dowling, the Irish director who has headed the Guthrie since 1995, decided it was time to order up a new theater with multiple stages. After a review of more than 35 architects, a search committee settled unanimously on Nouvel. "We were taken by his concern for the surroundings," says Dowling. "It was important to him to connect the theater to the river and the city."

The $125 million building that Nouvel has delivered is actually three theaters: a thrust stage that seats 1,100, a proscenium house for 700 and a 200-seat "studio" for new plays. The new Guthrie, which also has its own restaurants and bars, is situated on a stretch of the Mississippi that was once a thriving industrial waterfront. Old mills and factories still survive nearby, and Nouvel looked to them for his first inspiration. "It was important to me to create a link with the history of the city," he explains. "I said to myself, 'Theater is an industry too.'"

But theater manufactures intangibles--spectacles, sensations, memories. So while the Guthrie bears a resemblance to the mills and granaries of the past, it also announces that it's a 21st century dream factory. Two vertical posts that rise from the roof may bring to mind industrial chimneys, but they're actually electronic signboards. Words and images shoot upward like the flames of bygone furnaces. The Guthrie's exterior walls are covered in dark-blue steel meant to recall grain silos. But the metal is imprinted with images from past Guthrie productions, scenes with great performers like Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy. "There are 'ghosts' on the walls," says Nouvel. "These are the ancestors of the place."

Nouvel has a shaved head and a bearish silhouette. When he pads around the theater, talking about ghosts and ancestors, he makes you think of Telly Savalas playing Macbeth, or he would if Savalas had been somebody who could use a word like polysemous to explain those electronic chimneys. (That means they have more than one meaning.) While anyone who can come up with polysemous speaks perfectly competent English, Nouvel's is a bit idiosyncratic. As he indicates a large window that looks over the river, he says, "We want to keep it open so you can feel the noise of the river."

Then again, he may mean just what he says about feeling the noise. Paradox, disassociation and derangement of the senses are things Nouvel loves to play with. That window, for instance, is set in a deep recess of mirrored stainless steel. Look up and you see, reflected in the upper panel, the cars on the roadway beneath you. Look down and the lower panel reflects the sky. Up, earth; down, sky. His Cartier Foundation in Paris is a glass-walled structure with a freestanding glass wall situated a few yards in front of it. The effect is to create multiple veils of transparency in which the building seems to dematerialize.

The Guthrie, by contrast, seems more weighty at first. But with its projections and "ghosts," its mirrors and terraces, it turns out to be a very open place. That would be part of Nouvel's love of paradox. If the Guthrie gains him the prestige in the U.S. he deserves, here's another paradox you can count on. His buildings may aim to dematerialize, but you'll be seeing a lot more of them.