Curtain Up!

Sunday, Jun. 11, 2006 By RICHARD LACAYO/MINNEAPOLIS

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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 5-ft. by 10-ft. plate of glass that's set into the floor of a long corridor of his new Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, Minn. 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 178 ft. across and 60 ft. 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 a 60-ft. drop. 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 as it happens, he probably is.

For two decades Nouvel, 60, who is based in Paris, has been one of the world's best-known and most closely followed architects. But he's 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.) Although stage productions won't begin until next month, the new Guthrie has its gala opening on June 25.

What the 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. If Mary Tyler Moore were still throwing her hat in the air, it would be hard for her not to hit a major design statement.