It’s doubtful that people will camp out in order to be the first inside the newly expanded Walker Art Center, but who knows? They did at Ikea in Bloomington last year; surely some flapdoodle ought to accompany the unveiling of a shimmering contemporary art center designed by avant-garde Swiss architects. However, to members of the media who toured the building while it was under construction, it’s been made clear that art comes first, not architecture—in the galleries, that is. These spaces are straightforward, unassuming adaptations of the elegant white boxes Edward Larrabee Barnes designed for the Walker’s 1971 building. This is entirely appropriate, given how the “Bilbao effect” has curdled, in some quarters, into the “Bilbao backlash,” whereby some people accuse globally prominent “starchitects” (such as Frank Gehry, builder of Bilbao) of designing museums that try to upstage the art they shelter.
Still, you don’t hire a firm like Herzog and de Meuron if you merely want your new building to ape another building. (Some grumble, for instance, about Cesar Pelli’s Minneapolis Public Library, which they feel is disappointingly similar—on the outside, anyway—to the building it has replaced.) So while the architects played it straight in the galleries, the rest of the expansion is a funhouse of odd and surprising angles, in stark contrast to the Barnes building’s severe rectangular forms.
A critical angle comes into play in the expansion’s main corridor along Hennepin Avenue. In this space, which connects the lobby and museum shop to a stairway and a gallery in the Barnes building, the floor is raked at the same angle as the public sidewalk outside, along Hennepin Avenue as it climbs Lowry Hill. The slope is remarkable, but not difficult to navigate, since the function of the space is to channel people from one place to another. In architectural terms, this is known as the “program,” and the “theme” of the program, as it were, is transparency. In layman’s terms: The architects want people outside to look inside and see what other people are doing—thus the double-paned glass curtain wall. The program for this corridor also includes lounging, as the space is called the Hennepin Lounge, not the Hennepin Corridor. (The prominence of lounges in the expansion brings to mind loitering people wearing aggressively interesting footwear and/or eyewear and/or Macintosh products, making very little eye contact.) To facilitate lounging, custom benches were designed with legs that are longer on one end to accommodate the angled floor. While some people will no doubt prefer the bucolic views from the garden lounge on the west side of the building, others will find it restful, in an airport-y kind of way, to sit in the Hennepin Lounge and watch vehicles jockeying to get over to the I-94 onramp. And if one foot touches the tilted floor while the other just barely dangles, consider it a subtle yet singular architectural experience.
So where the original Walker is all restraint and rectitude, the expansion aims for surprise—and a peculiarly simple type of sumptuousness. Consider the materials. The emblematic object of the Barnes building would have to be a purplish-brown brick, but several visual motifs run through Herzog and de Meuron’s expansion. Most prominent is its aluminum mesh skin (on a less fancy building this would be called “siding”), while inside are bursts of curvy, baroque latticework; gleaming Venetian plaster walls; and gorgeous chandeliers made from molten glass. Incidentally, most of these materials have been cleverly translated into exclusive merchandise for the museum shop.
Speaking of the museum shop, it, too, was supposed to have a tilted floor like that in the Hennepin Lounge—continuing that angled parallelism, if you will, with the city sidewalk outdoors. But that presented problems for the retail space, whose location in the expansion is as visible as the former was hidden. Stationary benches with mismatched legs are one thing, but merchandise tables, which shopkeepers move around regularly, would be a royal pain if they had angled bases. Then, too, there is the experience of the shopper to consider. Standing on the placidly horizontal floor in the museum shop, one can look out at the determined dynamism of the tilted floor in the Hennepin Lounge—and at the floor of the adjacent lobby, which is not so much a tilted plane as one that seems to fall away just a bit. To stand on such a floor can be slightly disorienting, an effect that is not conducive to comfort, which is crucial in encouraging consumerism. So design ideals did not fully give way to the duller demands of commerce; the architects merely raised the bottom line, so to speak. When you visit the museum shop, you will no doubt notice that in this space, it’s the ceiling that tilts.—Julie Caniglia
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