The Museum of Chance

Architecture must be the least spontaneous of the arts. While composers and artists have long explored the unpredictable, from John Cage's variable musical scores to Jackson Pollack's action paintings, architects have often felt compelled to rationalize our every move, given the cost and complexity of building. Which is why the Walker Art Center's new addition, designed by Herzog & de Meuron (in association with Hammel, Green and Abrahamson) stands as such a significant achievement: It embraces the idea of chance in ways that few architects have.

Extending uphill from the existing brick-clad museum designed by Edward Larrabee Barnes in 1971, the addition consists of a glass-and-stucco-clad base-containing galleries, offices, service areas, and a "town square"-on top of which stands a dented, crumpled cube housing a performance hall, restaurant, and entertainment space. Facing a major thoroughfare in Minneapolis, the addition provides a piece of public art on a grand scale-and a sly reflection of its surroundings.



Disorderly Context

Christine Binswanger, the partner at Herzog & de Meuron in charge of the design, recognized that randomness pervades the Walker's context. The new cube, for example, which stands askew of the city's grid, responds to the similarly off-kilter orientation of nearby civic buildings, including the city's Catholic basilica, Episcopal cathedral, and Methodist church. Like all good public art, Binswanger's scheme draws our attention to something that has long existed in the landscape but gone largely overlooked.

But she and her fellow designers also saw in that randomness an organizing principle for the building itself. While the addition's galleries have the same rectangular shape and proportions as those in the Barnes building, the relationship among the new galleries has an accidental quality, like the pieces of paper that Jacques Herzog flung across a table at a public lecture at the Walker when asked to describe the building's plan. The meandering circulation space that results from this scattering of rooms recalls an expressionist stage set or a medieval street, with sloping brown-brick floors, leaning polished-plaster walls, and jagged paisley-patterned entryways, aimed at encouraging random encounters of people with art and one another.



Random Acts of Cladding

Most discoveries, of course, occur by chance, as is evident in the design of the addition's exterior. Given the lobbies, stairs, and dining spaces around its perimeter, it hardly mattered where windows went in the cube. The architects studied the elevations by folding, cutting, and unfolding possible cladding materials, like a game of paper dolls gone wild. Eventually, questions of cost and ease of construction led to reducing the number of openings, with a few large, asymmetrical windows illuminating the major interior spaces and some small, hexagonal windows providing views of the city. Yet the architects' process revealed how enough random acts could produce highly functional results.

At the same time, enough repetition can enhance our perception of random differences, as artists such as Andy Warhol and Gerhard Richter have shown. That paradox arose in the cladding of the Walker addition. Because a rainscreen wall allows the outer surface to be almost anything, the architects explored a range of materials from the peculiar (wood shingles, slumped glass) to the poetic (copper, aluminum, and fabric). The last of these had almost been selected when, in a full-scale demonstration, the internally illuminated fabric skin revealed itself to be a major bug attractor-not a good idea in mosquito-heavy Minnesota. At the last minute, the architects returned to earlier cladding studies, arriving at an innovative solution of aluminum-mesh "pillows" that have a randomly crinkled outer surface and a flat inner surface attached to a low-cost insulated wall (see page 52). The four edges of the 4-foot-square pillows have the same profile, allowing the panels to butt together in any orientation, both easing their installation and creating nonrepeating patterns on the ex- terior. Here, order allows randomness to occur.

The Walker's addition stands, appropriately enough, somewhere between architecture and art, serving the needs of the client in a series of compelling spaces while also raising questions about the relationships between repetition and randomness and between order and disorder through tactile, material means. Such questions underlie every work of architecture, although unexpected occurrences often don't happen in buildings until after their completion. What Herzog & de Meuron has done is embrace the dynamics of chance in the design itself, showing how randomness can be a reasonable architectural response.

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