Guthrie Theater

Minneapolis's original Guthrie Theater, a 1963 thrust-stage house by Ralph Rapson built to give Tyrone Guthrie's classical repertory a permanent home outside New York, had outgrown its site by the 1990s; the company chose a new plot on the Mississippi riverfront, in a former flour-milling district being reinvented as parkland, and Rapson's building was later demolished. Jean Nouvel's replacement, developed with the local firm Architectural Alliance as executive architect, wraps three stages — the 1,100-seat thrust-stage Wurtele, a 700-seat proscenium and a black-box studio — in dark blue-black metal panels printed with enlarged photographs from the company's own production history, so the building's skin doubles as an archive. Its signature move is the Endless Bridge, a 178-foot cantilevered lobby that thrusts out from the fourth floor toward the river and stops in mid-air, open to the public free of charge whenever the building is in use. The $125 million building opened in 2006, on the same riverbank the milling companies once used to ship flour by barge.