All in all, Ouroussoff digs HdM's new Walker. | prev | HdM @ Tate Modern


April 15, 2005
ARCHITECTURE REVIEW | WALKER ART CENTER
An Expansion Gives New Life to an Old Box
By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF

MINNEAPOLIS

EVEN amid all the jostling institutional egos - with one museum after another gushing about ambitious expansion plans - it's hard not to get excited about the Walker Art Center's new home.

For decades now, the Walker has been one of the liveliest museums in the country, an institution that maintained a strong independent voice despite its ties to the mainstream art world. When the museum hired the Swiss team of Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron to design a $67 million expansion and renovation of its existing 1970's-era building, it seemed like a match made in heaven. The architects had built their reputations on museum projects like London's Tate Modern and the Goetz Collection in Munich, known for their meticulously refined materials and a sense of inner tranquillity.

The result is an exhilarating place to view art, one that packs in 11,000 square feet of additional gallery space, a 385-seat theater, a hip new restaurant and an expanded bookstore while upholding art's place as the center of the museum experience. Anchored by an aluminum-clad tower, the addition is a masterly example of how exhausted motifs can acquire new meaning when reworked in a fresh setting.

Even so, longtime fans of the architects' work may feel mildly disappointed when they first approach the museum, on a multi-lane avenue midway between the city's uptown bars and coffee shops and its downtown skyscrapers. Herzog & de Meuron's best designs tend to come packaged in exquisite wrappers like bands of shimmering copper or embossed concrete. But the Walker's new tower is clad in a pattern of gray aluminum panels that fade into the dull Minneapolis skyline rather than engage the eye, a minor but unfortunate blemish on an otherwise enchanting design.

The original Walker, designed by Edward Larabee Barnes, is the kind of blank brick Modernist box that not so long ago would have been widely derided by historicists. Today, that stoicism is more likely to inspire admiration.

Rather than worry about swings in fashion, Herzog & de Meuron's approach is to build on that history. The lightness of the aluminum tower functions as a visual counterpoint to the forbidding Barnes building, infusing it with a new dignity.

The contrast between the two forms also echoes the stone towers of two churches across the street and the cluster of skyscrapers in the distance. Viewed as part of this panoply, the Walker evokes the tangled relationship between culture, commerce and religion at the beginning of a new century. And it hints at the museum's aggressive public mission, its belief in art's power "to redeem our isolation," as the critic Dave Hickey once put it.

Of course, that message would have more resonance if the tower were a more alluring object. Originally Herzog & de Meuron had planned to wrap it in a luminous Teflon fabric like an enormous paper lantern, but museum officials decided that would be too costly. The final version - a grid of woven aluminum panels that are molded to look like gently crumpled paper - is far less hypnotic, especially from a distance, where the intricately worked surfaces are barely visible.

Still, the tower does work as part of a drawn-out architectural narrative. Cantilevered out over the sidewalk, its corner forms a striking entry canopy, sucking you into the museum's lobby. From there, a shallow staircase funnels you up into the tower, a kind of compact vertical city that houses the majority of the museum's public zones - restaurant, performing arts theater and events spaces.

Stacked one atop another, these various spaces seep into each other visually as you rise, heightening the sense of compression. A large window cut out of the lobby ceiling allows you to peer up into the restaurant lounge; in the restaurant, the ceiling slopes down at one end to make room for the belly of the theater above.

The result is a buzzing social sphere that serves as a counterpoint to the more contemplative spaces devoted to art.

To play up that contrast, the architects draw out the procession to the galleries. Visitors file along a broad glass-enclosed corridor that runs parallel to the road outside and feeds into the galleries. The pace in meant to echo the fluid rhythm of the cars streaming by outside and the broad, flat expanses of the Midwest.

As you enter the galleries, the balance between the old and new buildings reaches a near perfect pitch. Barnes's building, one of his best, was conceived as a series of platforms that spiral up around a central core, a system that has been favorably compared to Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim. I wouldn't go that far, but the sequence through the galleries has a calming rhythm. Herzog & de Meuron preserves the spirit of Barnes's design by creating a series of new galleries that stretch out between the two towers at ground level. The result is to draw out the procession through the galleries and, by implication, bring the experience of viewing art into step with our daily lives. To help give that experience some cohesion, they extend Barnes's heavy concrete beams and brick paving throughout.

Look closer, though, and you'll notice that the details have been sharply refined. Deep portals framed by elaborately decorated wood panels encourage you to pause mentally before entering each gallery. Beams inside the new galleries are shallower and more compressed so that they don't distract from the artworks.

These are the kind of subtle design details that make curators swoon, and allow you to focus on the art.

The approach reflects a growing willingness among architects to address the past forthrightly rather than slavishly mimicking it or, worse, treating it with contempt. And Herzog & de Meuron has an evident knack for attacking each project with fresh eyes. At the Tate Modern in London, the building that first brought them to wide public attention, critics were won over by the simplicity of the design and the hypnotic quality of the surfaces. The architects have an instinctive feel for the sensual surface of things.

Here, the materials are less sophisticated but the overall experience is more carefully calibrated. Instead of a monumental object, the architects have fashioned a building that hovers at the intersection of urban and suburban cultures - no small feat in a country that seems to be dividing more and more along those lines.

That vision might have been articulated with more panache. But it says something about the level the architects have set for themselves that we expect to be dazzled each time we approach one of their buildings.