Guthrie Theater
Minneapolis
Ateliers Jean Nouvel

Ateliers Jean Nouvel prepares audiences for the artifice of drama with ghostly imagery, bold colors, and bravura form

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	Click here for slide show. Photo © Roland Halbe

By James S. Russell, AIA

The bladelike form that projects 178 feet from the shimmering, midnight-blue bulk of the Guthrie Theater sums up everything willfully idiosyncratic yet keenly intuited about Jean Nouvel’s design. What he calls “the endless bridge” extends a two-story lobby inside, offering a sublime connection between Minneapolis’s downtown and the long-isolated banks of the Mississippi River.

In making a presence that is urban, yet architecturally and theatrically evocative, Jean Nouvel (with Minneapolis-based firm Architectural Alliance) realizes the expansive vision of Joe Dowling, the Guthrie’s artistic director. He speaks of the $125 million building that opened in June as “an artistic, architectural, and economic force on the banks of the Mississippi.”

Dowling wanted to reproduce the thrust stage that had become the theater’s signature. The stage, pioneered by legendary director Tyrone Guthrie, who founded the theater in 1963, juts into the audience bowl with an asymmetrical platform, creating a uniquely involving and intimate, in-the-round experience. (Guthrie worked with renowned local architect Ralph Rapson. The much-altered original will be torn down.) Dowling added a conventional proscenium theater, which the Guthrie had never had. Its distinct division between audience and players would “get beyond the limitations of the thrust stage,” he said in an interview. Those limitations include props that can block views, and the necessity for actors to constantly move around to include the audience on all sides. The new structure also brings to the Guthrie a home-based black-box studio. With its expanded learning spaces, Dowling sees the new Guthrie as not just one of America’s premier regional theaters, but “a national center for theater arts and theater education.”

Though the theater had obtained a 900-foot-long site, Nouvel shocked Dowling by proposing to mound up the 285,000-square-foot building to a 10-story height at the site’s western end. (The unused land will become a park.) The building’s form exudes a barely contained energy, like an early-20th-century factory by Eric Mendelsohn. Scudding across its shimmering facade, by contrast, are what seem at first reflections. They coalesce into ghostly images screen-printed onto the surface: scenes from Hamlet or Of Mice and Men. The haunting images evoke the Guthrie’s distinguished history and future ambitions: The building’s industrial forms extend a 12-story-high skyline formed by an adjacent grain silo and flour mills—monumental relics of the city’s past that have been adapted as condominiums, the Mill City Museum [RECORD, February 2004, page 122], and a park of industrial archaeology.

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Formal name of Project:
Guthrie Theater

Location:
Minneapolis

Gross square footage:
285,000 sq. ft.

Total project cost:
$125 million

Owner:
The Guthrie Theater

Architect:
Ateliers Jean Nouvel
www.jeannouvel.com

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