Word: steels
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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...
...Germany, for example, they imprinted images by German photographer Thomas Ruff. But what really interests them is not applied decoration but the challenge of finding ways to make the structure and the surface design one. That was the old dream of architectural Modernism, which settled for lines of steel and glass up and down the front of a building. Herzog and de Meuron are always looking for something more complicated. For their first U.S. commission, a winery in Yountville, Calif., they constructed walls from chunks of basalt ranging in size from baseballs to boulders. But instead of being mortared together...
...masterwork is the Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. The smallish museum concentrates on 20th century American art, and the exterior can be seen as a tough, gleefully manic (that is, American) work of Cubist sculpture or as a giant brushed-stainless-steel popcorn kernel, or as a wizard's castle in some 23rd century fairy tale. Inside, where huge skylights bathe the galleries in sunlight, the feeling is serene but never static...
...consistently produced marvelous, singular work, and the house he just finished in the Dallas suburb of Highland Park is particularly fine. Set on a steep, forested site in a neighborhood of conventionally swanky Texas mansions, the new house is a not-quite-severe collage of limestone, concrete and black steel, simultaneously grave and jazzy. Nor is it simply a multimillion-dollar one-liner: the entrance to the place is one thing (giant, portentous limestone chunks), the inside quite another (vast, airy volumes), and the rear (a huge, mirrorized steel plate) still another. Out back, a 60-ft. ramp projects uselessly...
Tunis is quiet after midnight, when the phone rings. This is a Yasser Arafat tradition, summoning visitors at all hours to make their way through a gauntlet of steel barricades to a villa in a quiet residential corner of the city. The stucco house looks like any other, except that it is surrounded by young men in jeans, bearing Kalashnikovs, smoking cigarettes. Their job is to keep the Chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization alive -- and they take it seriously. Male guests are patted down, their pockets emptied, wallets searched. Women are scanned with ultrasensitive metal detectors, their purses % ransacked...