The architecture critic of the Wall Street Journal responds to Ada Louise Huxtable Meanders in Minneapolis, saying that CultureGrrl misinterpreted as praise her WSJ review of Jean Nouvel‘s Guthrie Theater:
Was I too subtle? Too tongue-in-cheek? Too ironic? Please read the piece again! I thought my description made it clear how off-putting and over-the-top I found it. It’s not exactly praise to say that a blue glass window upstages nature and turns it into an architectural accessory or that yellow glass gives a relentlessly jaundiced hue inside and out.
Stating that you could be a reluctant, disoriented participant in Nouvel’s coercive drama should have suggested that maybe I was (and am): stumbling into that RED theater, with its chain mail walls…the vertiginously rising escalators…the “nightclub style.” The site use and building parti [concept for the building’s design] are extremely skillful. Any fair-minded critic has to admit that, like Nouvel’s style or not (and I don’t, anymore than you do).
I guess readers will have to judge for themselves, but I am disappointed that it wasn’t clear to you. When we agree, as we certainly did on much of the Guthrie, I am sorry that my way of expressing it was not clear to you.
My highest praise went to Cesar Pelli’s Central Library, not the Guthrie. The point of the piece was the extraordinary range of Minneapolis’s new architecture.
Point taken.
CultureGrrl
Lee Rosenbaum's cultural commentary
an ArtsJournal blog