Word: herzog
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...usually think of buildings as things made of concrete, glass and steel, Swiss architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron would like to remind you that buildings are also made of shadows, glimmerings, textures and smells. This is, after all, probably the only architectural team ever to have formulated its own perfume. Called Rotterdam--O.K., these guys have no future in retail--it was produced in a tiny edition of just 1,000 bottles to accompany a museum show of their work in that Dutch city last year. Herzog, the more talkative of the pair, is quick to explain that...
...record, the de Young Museum, Herzog and de Meuron's latest and most intricately gratifying project, which opened recently in San Francisco, smells of only one thing: an unmistakable whiff of genius. This is a building to rank with the best to appear in the U.S. in the past few years, one to give Frank Gehry ideas. A sparkling enigma, it simultaneously cuts a sharp figure and demurely withdraws behind a camouflaged surface. Behind its blunt façade, glass-walled wedges of garden emerge inside. Herzog likes to compare it all to Kim Novak in Hitchcock's Vertigo, with...
...next 15 or so years, as the metal oxidizes and turns green, the leaf-shadow illusion will deepen, drawing the $135 million museum further into the surrounding vegetation even as its metallic diagonals continue to resist being absorbed visually by nature. "We like to talk about paradox," says Herzog, "this thin layer masking things. In some lights this building almost disappears. In a different light it's very sculptural. Then in San Francisco you have the fog, which penetrates the perforations. We like that...
Speaking of we, how exactly do you collaborate on a creation as original as this? It probably helps that Herzog and de Meuron, both 54, have known each other and liked many of the same things since they were 7. They pursued separate paths in college, then veered back to architecture and established their firm in 1978. When they first gained notice, it was as dedicated architectural Minimalists, expelling every trace of excess from elegant boxes. In no time, though, they were lured to the problem of how to make those boxes hold the eye as well as the mind...
...land can seduce the would-be conqueror, be he a general or a filmmaker. Herzog's amazing parable, about a 16th century Spanish explorer intoxicated and ultimately destroyed by the voluptuous verdancy of the Amazon, has a daft energy so intense that it seems to be a study of insanity from the inside. Klaus Kinski's splendid, spuming performance lives in there too: it is less an impersonation of imperial madness than a total occupation...