Evolving Signatures, Walker Art Center Addition by Herzog and de Meuron

Evolving Signatures

Walker Art Center Addition by Herzog & de Meuron

These days it seems that every art museum with more than just local ambitions is betting on the transformative power of “signature architecture”. Little does it matter that some of these institutions do not own a collection, because visitors will come, if not for the art then for the architecture.

Given the history of Minneapolis as a lumber and milling town, one might be forgiven for assuming that the new addition to the Walker Art Center by Herzog & de Meuron would be a prime example of such cultural import. The city has indeed seen a recent surge of projects by renowned architects, but the Walker is hardly an unknown in the cultural landscape.

It is today one of the 10 most visited art museums in the United States with an attendance of half a million visitors per year and a collection of over 11,000 artworks. From its very beginning 125 years ago, the Walker’s mission has been decidedly populist and the Center understands itself as a catalyst for creative expression and urban culture as much as an art museum.

The new extension was thus intended to provide additional space, but also to represent the Walker’s identity with a stimulating building that would differ from the hermetic structure of the current museum, designed by Edward Larrabee Barnes.

Herzog & de Meuron buildings are easy to recognize, but their “handwriting” seems to be in constant flux. There is doubtlessly an overriding grammar to their work; a preference for minimal and anonymous typologies, a fascination with texture, skin and natural structures, paired with a strong belief in the phenomenological and social nature of architectural space. But if anything, the constant of the designer’s recent oeuvre has been a dramatic evolution of their formal language.

The Walker Art Center extension incorporates these diverging natures, it is essentially two buildings in one: One the one hand a hyper-expressive cluster of new program, on the other hand a sequence of minimalist galleries.

The exterior consists of a fanning array of translucent and transparent structures, dominated by a central wrinkled metal mesh-clad box with irregular cut-outs. The aggressively cantilevered overhang of this volume, which contains the performance theatre, bookstore and restaurants, forms the new main entrance, sided by a glass atrium in which the visitor’s flow is pushed face to face against the 9-lane highway traffic of Hennepin Avenue.

The architects make no secret of their dislike of American car culture, and creating spaces for pedestrian traffic might be a somewhat idealist gesture in a city dominated by “skywalks” and malls, but the effect provides a unique moment of urban intensity that inspires its surroundings.

As was to be expected, much thought and experimentation has been put into the various skins of the building. Folded and punched stretch-metal, sandblasted concrete patterns, polished white plaster, hardly a surface has been left without a peculiar texture, culminating in the almost baroque ornamental grates and wall panels of the performance theatre.

The metal mesh enclosure of the exterior might be the most demanding facet of the design as has to inscribe a quality onto what is an essentially a large closed container. Developed through explorations of paper folding and cutting, the crinkled surface is made of randomly rotated but identical panels. The texture has a rather mysterious experiential quality, at times appearing like a dark translucent veil, at other times like glacial ice, but some of the logic and beauty of the initial “urban paper lantern” concept has disappeared in the editing process.

The subtle shifts and angles of the envelope converge on the interior into a dramatic sequence of spatial overlaps and folds, alleys and compressed perspectives, an intensely physical and almost cinematic space that releases its energy back toward the sculpture garden and streetscape.

While the ground floor circulation follows the topography of the site, the vertical transitions are sliced into the interstitial space between galleries and foyers.

The building envelope here thickens and becomes itself a layer of program, containing stairs, technical equipment and other secondary functions.

But before we forget, the Walker is also an art museum. Ingested by this landscape of spectacle are the exhibition spaces, basically continuations of the original Barnes arrangement. The new galleries are white boxes, abstract and minimal. Perfectly detailed and proportioned but entirely artificially lit, these spaces a clearly geared toward time-proven curatorial flexibility, respectful to the art to the point of disappearance.

For once the conflict between art and self-confident architecture perpetually posed since Wright’s Guggenheim seems to be resolved, if not avoided. The building does not define a new way to display art but attempts to re-write the art museum as such into a context of blurring cultural and urban definitions.

Surely, Thomas Barlow Walker would have approved.