The Box of Shadows

By Richard Lacayo / San Francisco

If you 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 the fragrance was not an attempt to go head to head with J. Lo. They just wanted to make a theoretical point. "We very strongly insist on architecture's potential to reach all the senses," he says, "not just the visual. At a time of digital media and cyberspace, architecture has this old-fashioned potential. You can touch it, you can feel it, you can see it, you can smell it."

For the 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 fac,ade, glass-walled wedges of garden emerge inside. Herzog likes to compare it all to Kim Novak in Hitchcock's Vertigo, with her cool surface and her plunging secrets.

About surface: craftsmanship in large buildings is supposed to be dead, killed by Modernist ideology and cost considerations. What this building says is that maybe craftsmanship has a high-tech future after all. To connect the de Young visually to its setting in Golden Gate Park, the architects have wrapped the structure in a copper skin embossed and perforated to produce, from a distance, the appearance of dappled sunlight filtering through trees. That pattern was copied from the blurred pixels of a digital photograph, then converted by computer into a blueprint to guide the manufacture of holes and indentations on thousands of individual copper plates.

Over the 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. They solved it for a while with walls that had etched surfaces; on a library in 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, the rocks are caged loosely behind a steel-mesh fencing so that light filters through them and into the building's interior. As with the de Young, their winery is a building with walls that are also not walls, both solid and porous.

Four years ago, when they won the Pritzker Prize, architecture's most prestigious award, Herzog and de Meuron were best known for the Tate Modern in London, a refurbished power plant with its turbine hall preserved as a massive art-display space. By that time, from their home base in Basel, they were conquering the world. The past few years have seen the completion in Tokyo of a much discussed Prada store, with its honeycomb steel surfaces set with bulging lenses of glass; a major addition to the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minn.; and a soccer stadium in Munich. Their relatively small firm has also snagged one of the biggest architectural commissions of the decade, the 2008 Olympic Stadium in Beijing, which will be an undulating nest wrapped in an irregular ribbonwork of crisscrossing steel.

The original de Young was a Spanish-style structure completed in 1926. Badly damaged by the 1989 earthquake, it was demolished five years ago. The new museum, which is privately financed, occupies less than two-thirds of the grounds of the former building, returning two acres to the park. The public is admitted free to some of it, including the sculpture garden by landscape designer Walter Hood and the observation floor of the 144-ft. tower, with its supreme views of San Francisco.

But however beautiful the outlook from the tower, the most interesting sight lines are the ones inside. The de Young collections divide roughly into two parts. One is a significant assembly of art from Africa, Mesoamerica and the Pacific Islands. For those works, which include many freestanding carved figures, the architects have devised a series of long, curvaceous, wood-paneled galleries with tall glass vitrines, an enchanted forest of gods and fetishes. Just one of the smart pleasures of the design is that as you turn from there toward the Early American art, the view opens onto a long, straight enfilade of rooms, a smart transition from the non-Western to the Western world and one of the most inviting processions of gallery rooms anywhere in the U.S. Is there such a thing as voluptuous intelligence? Sure there is. You can smell it a mile away.