Architecture: The Box of Shadows

(2 of 3)

Speaking of we, how exactly do you collaborate on a creation as original as this? It probably helps that Herzog and de Meuron, both 54, have known each other and liked many of the same things since they were 7. They pursued separate paths in college, then veered back to architecture and established their firm in 1978. When they first gained notice, it was as dedicated architectural Minimalists, expelling every trace of excess from elegant boxes. In no time, though, they were lured to the problem of how to make those boxes hold the eye as well as the mind. They solved it for a while with walls that had etched surfaces; on a library in Germany, for example, they imprinted images by German photographer Thomas Ruff. But what really interests them is not applied decoration but the challenge of finding ways to make the structure and the surface design one. That was the old dream of architectural Modernism, which settled for lines of steel and glass up and down the front of a building. Herzog and de Meuron are always looking for something more complicated. For their first U.S. commission, a winery in Yountville, Calif., they constructed walls from chunks of basalt ranging in size from baseballs to boulders. But instead of being mortared together, the rocks are caged loosely behind a steel-mesh fencing so that light filters through them and into the building's interior. As with the de Young, their winery is a building with walls that are also not walls, both solid and porous.

Four years ago, when they won the Pritzker Prize, architecture's most prestigious award, Herzog and de Meuron were best known for the Tate Modern in London, a refurbished power plant with its turbine hall preserved as a massive art-display space. By that time, from their home base in Basel, they were conquering the world. The past few years have seen the completion in Tokyo of a much discussed Prada store, with its honeycomb steel surfaces set with bulging lenses of glass; a major addition to the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minn.; and a soccer stadium in Munich. Their relatively small firm has also snagged one of the biggest architectural commissions of the decade, the 2008 Olympic Stadium in Beijing, which will be an undulating nest wrapped in an irregular ribbonwork of crisscrossing steel.

The original de Young was a Spanish-style structure completed in 1926. Badly damaged by the 1989 earthquake, it was demolished five years ago. The new museum, which is privately financed, occupies less than two-thirds of the grounds of the former building, returning two acres to the park. The public is admitted free to some of it, including the sculpture garden by landscape designer Walter Hood and the observation floor of the 144-ft. tower, with its supreme views of San Francisco.