Architecture: Curtain Up!

(2 of 3)

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.