Architecture: The Box of Shadows

If you usually think of buildings as things made of concrete, glass and steel, Swiss architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron would like to remind you that buildings are also made of shadows, glimmerings, textures and smells. This is, after all, probably the only architectural team ever to have formulated its own perfume. Called Rotterdam--O.K., these guys have no future in retail--it was produced in a tiny edition of just 1,000 bottles to accompany a museum show of their work in that Dutch city last year. Herzog, the more talkative of the pair, is quick to explain that the fragrance was not an attempt to go head to head with J. Lo. They just wanted to make a theoretical point. "We very strongly insist on architecture's potential to reach all the senses," he says, "not just the visual. At a time of digital media and cyberspace, architecture has this old-fashioned potential. You can touch it, you can feel it, you can see it, you can smell it."

For the record, the de Young Museum, Herzog and de Meuron's latest and most intricately gratifying project, which opened recently in San Francisco, smells of only one thing: an unmistakable whiff of genius. This is a building to rank with the best to appear in the U.S. in the past few years, one to give Frank Gehry ideas. A sparkling enigma, it simultaneously cuts a sharp figure and demurely withdraws behind a camouflaged surface. Behind its blunt façade, glass-walled wedges of garden emerge inside. Herzog likes to compare it all to Kim Novak in Hitchcock's Vertigo, with her cool surface and her plunging secrets.

About surface: craftsmanship in large buildings is supposed to be dead, killed by Modernist ideology and cost considerations. What this building says is that maybe craftsmanship has a high-tech future after all. To connect the de Young visually to its setting in Golden Gate Park, the architects have wrapped the structure in a copper skin embossed and perforated to produce, from a distance, the appearance of dappled sunlight filtering through trees. That pattern was copied from the blurred pixels of a digital photograph, then converted by computer into a blueprint to guide the manufacture of holes and indentations on thousands of individual copper plates.

Over the next 15 or so years, as the metal oxidizes and turns green, the leaf-shadow illusion will deepen, drawing the $135 million museum further into the surrounding vegetation even as its metallic diagonals continue to resist being absorbed visually by nature. "We like to talk about paradox," says Herzog, "this thin layer masking things. In some lights this building almost disappears. In a different light it's very sculptural. Then in San Francisco you have the fog, which penetrates the perforations. We like that."