NOUVEL - Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis

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On the Mississippi, a Vision Steeped in an Industrial Past


Amanda Ortland/Guthrie Theater
New meaning out of a haggard landscape: the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis,
designed by Jean Nouvel, is on a former industrial site.

Below, a lobby inside the complex.

Amanda Ortland/Guthrie Theater
Muscular bravura: A lobby inside the new Guthrie Theater,
on the banks of the Mississippi in Minneapolis

NY TIMES
By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF

Architecture Review
July 4, 2006

MINNEAPOLIS — For fans who prefer that their heroes remain predictable, Jean Nouvel has been a bit of a puzzle lately.

Two decades ago he established his reputation with the Institute of the Arab World in Paris, whose southern facade, an enormous grid of filigreed steel apertures, suggested inscrutable camera lenses. In the ensuing years this architect could generally be counted on for big, bold forms; a fetishistic obsession with technology; and a magician's bag of optical tricks.

His most recent projects, however, like the phallic, candy-colored Agbar Tower in Barcelona and the anarchic mix at the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris, have drifted toward the wildly eccentric, as if Mr. Nouvel, now 60, were more interested in letting his imagination roam unfettered than in impressing critics and academics.

The new Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis should offer comfort to those who miss the 1980's Nouvel. Rising at the edge of the Mississippi, its confident forms are rooted in a vision of a muscular industrial America, and its structural bravura will certainly please the techno-fetishists. As a thoughtful response to the American city's evolving role as a haven for cultural tourism, it also coaxes new meaning out of a haggard landscape.

The site is a Modernist heaven on a former industrial strip along the riverfront. Just next to the complex is a grain elevator, similar to those that Le Corbusier once lauded as the American equivalent of the Parthenon, the "magnificent first fruits of a new age." An electric generating plant looms across the river; to the north, water rushes through a series of locks beneath an industrial bridge.

Like so many cities, of course, Minneapolis has gradually undergone an economic transformation. Most of the city's old flour mills were shut down long ago. The concrete grain elevator alongside the theater complex has been preserved as a historic monument, and a nearby row of warehouses has been converted into co-ops. Mr. Nouvel's design takes its initial cues from the city's early history. The complex's scale fits nicely with the structure next door. The boxy, piled-up forms echo the electric power plant across the street, anchoring the theater in the city's early industrial ethos rather than in the shopping centers and office towers downtown.

Yet that virile image of a landscape ruled by men and machines is tempered by Mr. Nouvel's typical subversiveness. The metal cladding is coated in midnight blue, a symbol of buttoned-down conservatism that suggests a killer in a pressed suit. A small terrace in a bright police-tape yellow juts impudently from the building's riverfront facade.

Enormous mirrored panels frame a restaurant terrace, snatching up refracted images of the surrounding city. Orange-colored LED images climb two towers that rise from the complex like high-tech smokestacks.

Mr. Nouvel's biggest gesture is a 175-foot-long cantilevered form that projects toward the river, its end abruptly sliced off at a sharp angle. Viewed from across the river, it looks like a bridge leading nowhere. Yet as you approach the main entrance along Second Street, as most visitors will, the cantilever reads as an extension of a walkway bridge that runs from the theater complex to a parking structure on the other side, an echo of the skywalks found elsewhere in downtown Minneapolis.

The cantilever houses a bar and an outdoor terrace. But its main role is symbolic. In embarking on such a spectacular structural effort for what most would consider a secondary space, Mr. Nouvel is upholding the value of the tangential experiences that are often the most important in life.

Inside, the main 1,100-seat hall, a nod to the liberal Modernism of the 1960's, pays homage to the underappreciated original Guthrie designed by Ralph Rapson with a thrust stage that bridges the distance between the performers and the audience. Seats spill down toward the stage from three sides.
Above, a sweeping balcony is set just off center, giving the room a wonderful edginess.

Mr. Nouvel has also designed a more conservative 700-seat proscenium theater — albeit in an erotic lipstick red that plays off the stiff formality of the space — and a 300-seat black box for experimental work.

But the true heart of the building is its connective tissue, like a two-tier public foyer where theatergoers will mingle during intermission. A large window at one end overlooks the area where workers assemble the stage sets; from the other side, people can amble out to the cantilevered bar and terrace.

Here and there, the images of past performances, faint as shadows, are imprinted on the foyer wall, ghosts from the Guthrie's past. But once you drift out to the cantilevered bar, a sense of flux returns. The windows are framed in a mirrored steel that blends city views with refracted images of nearby buildings. In warm weather, a breeze wafts in through a large open window, carrying the scent of the outdoors.

Suddenly we're not altogether sure where we find ourselves, and that's part of the point. The city, too, is a theater, a vast unstable laboratory that is constantly being reshaped by economic, political and imaginative forces. Seldom does that reality seem this seductive.

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

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The New Guthrie -- Pre-Construction Images ...

Photos courtesy of the Guthrie Theater


The Guthrie's three theater complex was designed by French architect Jean Nouvel. It will stand on the banks of the Mississippi River in downtown Minneapolis, just downriver from the Stone Arch Bridge. Ground breaking is scheduled for fall 2002, with completion expected in 2005.


The Guthrie on the River Complex will sit next to the Mill City Museum Ruins. It will be a corner stone of a downtown cutural corner which includes the museum, the Open Book literary arts center, and a new MacPhail School of Music planned nearby


One of the theaters will feature the Guthrie's signature thrust stage.


There will also be a 700 seat proscenium theater, and a flexible studio theater.


The design features a dramatic over-look called the "Endless Bridge" which will allow patrons to view the Mississippi panorama.

© Minnesota Public Radio, 2001

[stache]

What will they do with the old theater?

[lofter1]

Minneapolis' Guthrie Theater Gets New Home

npr.org
June 25, 2006

... As the new building opens, the Guthrie's original home is about to be torn down, making way for a sculpture garden.

Ralph Rapson, now 91 and still hard at work at his Minneapolis architecture firm, designed the original Guthrie Theater in the 1960s as a white space, light and open.

The new Guthrie theater does attempt to pay homage to Ralph Rapson's work. The legendary thrust stage for which the old Guthrie theater is best known has been meticulously recreated, only deviating to allow for wider seats and slightly better sightlines.

Rapson says when he heard that the Guthrie had bought a piece of land on the Mississippi riverfront a few years back, he sat down and designed a new theater for it.

He never submitted the design.


Guthrie Theater
An exterior view.

Guthrie Artistic Director Joe Dowling is tired of hearing lamentations over the loss of the old Guthrie.
He says it was beautifully designed, but not built to last.
Minnesota Public Radio

[stache]

Well that's kind of sad -

[lofter1]

It looks like this effort didn't work. The related website ( http://www.savetheguthrie.org/ ) is down ...

Save the Guthrie!

jetsetmodern
Feature Article
2002






GUTHRIE THEATRE, Minneapolis, Minnesota

"In the middle of the nation's heartland, the Guthrie Theatre is the Twin Cities' answer to the Great White Way. A work of striking originality, the Guthrie, which opened in 1963, is the realized dream of Sir Tyrone Guthrie, a visionary impresario who sought to create a world-class repertory company far from the pressures of Broadway. Designed by Ralph Rapson, a leading contributor to architecture's modern movement, the 1,300-seat theatre's thrust stage, acoustical ceiling clouds and multicolored seats revolutionized theatre design and created an atmosphere of immediacy and intimacy felt by actors and audience alike. The theatre has launched the careers of some of America's best-known actors, and its peerless acoustics have amplified a "who's who" of performers. Now, after forty years of use, the Guthrie Theater Company plans to abandon the facility and build a new home. The Walker Art Center, which owns the Guthrie, intends to tear it down and replace it with a sculpture garden and underground parking garage. If the Walker is allowed to go through with its plan, a genuine cultural landmark will face its final curtain call. "

source: USA TODAY

Saving the Guthrie Theatre is one of the topics of a special one-hour television broadcast by The History Channel with The National Trust for Historic Preservation. The History Channel program Save Our History: America's Most Endangered 2002 tells how these historic places have become threatened and why they must be saved. The hour-long special premieres Saturday, July 6, 2002 at 10pm ET/PT and airs again on Sunday, July 7.


The Zoning and Planning Committee of the Minneapolis City Council voted on SavetheGuthrie.org's appeal of the Walker Art Center's site plan calling for the demolition of the Guthrie Theater. They approved the Walker's plan to expand, but with a proviso that it not mean the demolition of the theater. It is extremely important before then for friends of the theater to email committee members, as well as members of the full council, urging them to preserve this theatre. We're still a long way from saving this endangered landmark!

We are asking that any movement towards demolition be delayed until a full reuse study for the building can be completed. The National Trust for Historic Preservation declared this month that the Guthrie is one of its top 11 endangered sites nationwide. The National Trust has also agreed to help fund a reuse study.

Events have moved very quickly in recent days. The committee vote is only one hurdle we needed to clear. Their vote is only a recommendation which the full council can accept or reject. And the full council decision in turn may be vetoed by the mayor. However, it is crucial now for our side to show support for its drive to halt the demolition process. We need a reasonable period of time for possible reuse plans and business proposals to emerge.

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Guthrie Theater brings curtain down on original home

mpr.org
Jeff Baenen
Associated Press
May 5, 2006


(Photo by Marty Nordstrom, courtesy of the Guthrie Theater)
"Hamlet," the first production at the Guthrie Theater, opened May 7, 1963.
Pictured are George Grizzard as Hamlet, Jessica Tandy as Gertrude and members of the company.
It was directed by Sir Tyrone Guthrie.

More than 40 years after Sir Tyrone Guthrie started his theater in the nation's heartland, the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis will close with a last performance of Shakespeare's "Hamlet" on Sunday. Weeks later, the Guthrie will reopen across town in a new, $125 million three-stage complex.

Minneapolis, Minn. — (AP) - When Hamlet is bid a final "good night, sweet prince" on the Guthrie Theater stage, it also will mark a farewell to a venerated auditorium that helped birth the U.S. regional theater movement.

The old Guthrie will dim its lights 43 years to the day that it opened -- also with "Hamlet" -- on May 7, 1963.

Artistic director Joe Dowling believes Guthrie, a British theatrical director who died in 1971, would have approved of the new theater, which sits on the banks of the Mississippi River in the old flour-milling district of downtown Minneapolis.

"Guthrie was an innovator. Guthrie was a man who believed in change. All his life he promoted new ideas, new thoughts," Dowling says.

He points out that Guthrie did Shakespeare in modern dress, reintroduced the thrust stage -- in which the audience surrounds the actors on three sides -- and believed that the Mississippi was a big attraction in Minneapolis.

But the theater outgrew its old digs. While the Guthrie had an open-ended lease with the adjacent Walker Art Center, the 87,000-square-foot theater -- which has about 350 people on payroll when the season is in full swing -- had no room to expand, Dowling says.

But not everyone is ready to accept the end of the old Guthrie, which probably faces the wrecking ball late this summer.

"It was essentially the first enclosed theater built for a thrust stage in North America. It clearly put Minneapolis on the cultural map," says Royce Yeater, Midwest director of the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

Advocates for saving the Guthrie argue that it should be preserved for its cultural significance, its modernist exterior design by local architect Ralph Rapson and its acoustics.

"We are still maintaining hope that the Walker will see the light and actually try to sell the building, because we'd think it would be a wonderful investment opportunity for someone," says Paul Metsa, founder of SavetheGuthrie.org.

But the Walker conducted a reuse study five years ago and found no groups to take over the Guthrie space. The study also found that renovating and operating the theater would be too expensive.

The Walker, which reopened last year after a $73 million expansion, plans to demolish the old Guthrie to make way for an expansion of the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden ...

Copyright 2006 by The Associated Press

[ablarc]

Sadder and sadder.

[kz1000ps]

That back wall and ceiling makes me want to puke. And maybe it's the angle of the picture, but I can't imagine a 100-piece orchestra fitting on that "thrust" design - too narrow.



And if Tony Montana (Scarface) ever wanted a theatre for his mansion, I think it'd look a lot like this. I like it.

[ablarc]

After this, I still think Nouvel is a hack.

No[u]velty for its own sake.

[lofter1]

... I can't imagine a 100-piece orchestra fitting on that "thrust" design - too narrow.

The Guthrie space is for the staged performances of plays. No orchestras ...

The image is somewhat deceptive as the playing space at the oriignal Guthrie was quite expansive.

If the Nouvel version matches the original Rapson configuration / relationship between actors <> audience it should be fantastic -- as the prior Guthrie thrust stage was one of the more dynamic performance spaces around.

[Citytect]

I think to call Nouvel a hack is all-together too dismissive of his talent. He may not be dependable for creating great buildings. He's done a number of bad buildings. And his work has an arrogance to it that is unbecoming. But he is capable of doing good work. The Guthrie may not fit your taste, but it's a pretty interesting and functional building. 40 Mercer looks very promising. Agbar Tower has received some negative criticism, but it's also received a lot of praise. People either love it or hate it. I tend to like it. These are buildings from only the most recent few years; he's built numerous others throughout the 80's and 90's - most notably, or course, being the Arab World building. I also like the "additions" he made to the Gasometer in Vienna and Nouvel Opera in Lyon.

I'm not saying Nouvel is one of the world's greatest architects. But with all the truly unimaginative architecture being built at the bequest of greedy developers these days, it's hard for me to accept the labeling of Nouvel as simply a hack.