Nouvel Vogue

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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 1.5-m-by-3-m plate of glass that's set into the floor of a long corridor of his new Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, Minnesota. 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 54 m across and 18 m 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 an 18-m drop.[an error occurred while processing this directive] 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 this week, Nouvel will be doing some high flying indeed. The Guthrie has its gala opening on June 25; just five days before, Nouvel will be at home in Paris for the inauguration of another major work dedicated to what he calls "selective dematerialization." He has taken a prime parcel at the heart of the city, along the Seine at the foot of the Eiffel Tower, and artfully hidden a world-class museum in it.

His Musée du Quai Branly is perhaps the most radical expression yet of Nouvel's self-proclaimed pride in being "an architect of context." Its northern face, shielded from the road along the Seine by an immense transparent glass screen, exactly echoes the river's bend; on the west, it seamlessly abuts five late 19th century Hausmannian apartment buildings with a grace that leaves their courtyards intact. And along the southern exposure, where the public will begin entering the complex this week, Nouvel has given the museum just the right height and density to make accomplices rather than minions of the apartment buildings across the narrow Rue de l'Université.

But however sensitively it segues into its surroundings, there is nothing conventional about Nouvel's $258 million museum complex. "When you look at it, you may not know what it is," he muses. "But you know it isn't a social-security center." You may not even think museum on second glance, for this building intentionally swears off the pomp and grandeur that is de rigueur for big French state projects. As well it should, for its delicate purpose is to pull together France's collection of 300,000 artistic and cultural artifacts from Asia, the Americas, Africa and Oceania without a whiff of ex-imperial condescension. It will be the most visible Parisian legacy of Jacques Chirac, who is winding up 12 years as President and was Paris' mayor for 18 years before that; its inauguration offers him a rare respite from the political failures that have plagued his final years in office.

Chirac himself decided in 1999 to award the museum project to Nouvel, a Socialist voter who had been an outspoken critic of Chirac's urban policies. It was a felicitous choice: Stéphane Martin, the museum's president, who has worked closely with Nouvel since then, says, "We have never gotten mad at one another, which in the French tradition of such collaborations is remarkable." To some degree, that must be due to the immense role granted to Nouvel, not simply for the building, but for the museology itself. "This is the first time I've been able to work like this, around a collection," he says, "and it has been formidable to create harmony between the nature of the place and the objects."

He's done it by creating a museum that mimics on a physical level the changes that have marked the academic approach to what was once known as primitive art, but is now termed "the primary arts." The Musée du Quai Branly presents at any given time 3,500 of its objects, not as strictly anthropological artifacts, but as works of art from unique human contexts. The core of the museum is a vast space without partition, with zones defined for pieces from each of the four major geographical regions. Running through it is an undulating "river," along which visitors will move in a way that encourages them to make their own connections among the masks, sculptures, robes and musical instruments created across the ages and the continents. There's no obvious narrative. "It's a museum for adults," says Martin. Australian Aboriginal artists have been commissioned to create the ceiling and façade of one part of the building, and a living "vertical garden" of plants sprouts from another. The museum is surrounded by a forested parkland and pools of water, further blurring the lines between the West and elsewhere; between the observed and the observing; between Paris and the world.

The new museum gives Paris its third major Nouvel project. Farther up the river is the Institut du Monde Arabe, and farther south is the Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art. Spain, too, has been a Nouvel wonderland of late, with the opening last year of both his shimmering Agbar Tower in Barcelona and his new extension for the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid. By comparison, Nouvel has been 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.)

What the Guthrie's 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.

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 meters in front of it. The effect is to create multiple veils of transparency in which the building seems to dematerialize. With the Musée du Quai Branly, Nouvel again shows that his buildings are in deliberately complex interplay not just with their surroundings, but with their function. Not simple, but sublime; you might call them buildings for adults.