History
That building housed an auditorium facade mondrianesca modernist designed so that none of its 1,100 visitors were more than 15 feet from the actors. The idea was developed between the architect Rapson and Tyrone Guthrie, the British theater director who spearheaded the creation of a theater born in reaction to the commercialization of Broadway, which housed a major American regional theater companies, which combined the classical repertoire with experimentation as opposed to the products ‘light’ that took over New York in the sixties.
Location
The new theater is located on the banks of the Mississippi River in the neighborhood of the mills, off the Falls of St. Anthony, in the city of Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States, surrounded by silos and factories.
History
That building housed an auditorium facade mondrianesca modernist designed so that none of its 1,100 visitors were more than 15 feet from the actors. The idea was developed between the architect Rapson and Tyrone Guthrie, the British theater director who spearheaded the creation of a theater born in reaction to the commercialization of Broadway, which housed a major American regional theater companies, which combined the classical repertoire with experimentation as opposed to the products ‘light’ that took over New York in the sixties.
Location
The new theater is located on the banks of the Mississippi River in the neighborhood of the mills, off the Falls of St. Anthony, in the city of Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States, surrounded by silos and factories.
The site is a modernist paradise located in a strip that was once industrial, along the Mississippi River. Together the complex is a grain elevator, similar to that Le Corbusier hailed as the American equivalent of the Parthenon, as “magnificent first fruits of a new era.” Across the river stands a power generation plant, north, water flows through a series of locks beneath an industrial bridge.
Concept
Nouvel, aware of the historical weight of the institution, has respected the original scenario, but giving a touch of their own. For the building’s exterior was inspired by the surrounding landscape, dominated by the presence of the Mississippi River, to which Nouvel has launched a cantilever bridge, the Endless Bridge, the Endless Bridge, which can be accessed without purchasing a ticket for the theater.
The exterior is a composition of metal and glass that evokes industrial forms adapted to modern times.
The large circular volume, which protects the halls of the theater, evoking the shapes of the adjacent silos, while the rectangular structure of the towers is in harmony with nearby flour mills.
The landscape of Mississippi in Minneapolis, is defined by the falls, the locks and bridges, the great mills and silos, they left their impression on Walter Gropius and later in Le Corbusier, Bruno Taut, Erich Mendelsohn or Moisei Ginzburg , who labeled them as icons of modernity. The Guthrie Theater takes the silhouettes of factories and buildings of downtown, without imitating, with a record absolutely own.
Description
From the shore, shows a dramatic cantilevered 53 meters, contemporary interpretation of the no less spectacular silos around him, making both the volumes of the towers of downtown, like the cylinders of the silos, crosses and blends.
The industrial buildings in the area, along with a landscape with windmills and wheat, have also found their reflection in the exterior of a building on which were also reproduced posters of classic works belonging to the glorious past of the theater. Slender tubes of his banner, who spread messages of LED, evokes the smokestacks of factories and helps you to gain height to match the horizontal extension. The tower, which itself is 47 meters high and 24 meters which exceeds auction serves as a signal to announce the shows and works posted on the skyline.
…. “It’s because the architecture of Guthrie for their volumes, their colors, can be read as the distant echo of the silos, it is because the main foyer is advanced as a bridge to see the falls, here are the reasons of dialogue between the insignia of the mills and the theater, here is also why industrial walkways are replaced by skyways, and here at last why, along with direct reinterpretation Thrust, two new theaters, one front, another versatile, complete industrial metaphor the new Guthrie.
All the rest is just architecture. Without nostalgia, because this dialogue is evidently a pretext to invent and use techniques and materials of the early twenty-first century. History and modernity, then as now are friends, and Guthrie in the middle of mills and bridges, discover the legitimate ambition of becoming a clear landmark: the vitality and inventiveness of the theatrical culture in Minneapolis in 2002 . Jean Nouvel