MINNEAPOLIS, MN.- The Guthrie Theater, the country’s premier resident theater, announced its new home, designed by internationally renowned architect Jean Nouvel of Ateliers Jean Nouvel, will open on June 25, 2006. The new $125-million Guthrie is Jean Nouvel’s first completed North American project, and one of the largest theatrical arts building projects in the country. The Guthrie’s new building replaces its former facility at Vineland Place in Minneapolis. The new three-theater complex sits on the banks of the Mississippi River in downtown Minneapolis – a new architectural landmark that celebrates the Theater’s illustrious past and heralds its confident future.

By day, the 285,000-square-foot theater complex rises boldly on its riverfront site; the circular form of its thrust theater echoes the adjacent grain silos, its size in harmony with the volume of nearby flour mills, its metal sheeting evoking the industrial and agrarian buildings of Minneapolis’ past. Three vertical LED signs on top of the Guthrie reflect the industrial signage in the area, and a cantilevered “Endless Bridge,” extending the equivalent of 12 stories toward the Mississippi, provides spectacular views of the historic river valley. At dusk the twilight-blue theater complex seamlessly fades into the night, leaving only a few carefully chosen pictorial accents – large-scale images from past Guthrie productions screen printed onto the building’s exterior – floating like ghosts in the dark. “The new Guthrie will have a profound impact on both the cultural and economic life of the area. It will continue to attract the world’s greatest theatre artists, as well as thousands of visitors who will celebrate Minneapolis as a world class cultural destination,” said Guthrie Artistic Director Joe Dowling. “Nouvel’s design immediately identifies the building as a theater, as a place of mystery, a place where poetry mingles with image. It’s a striking example of how Nouvel links architecture and the arts so carefully.”

Architect Jean Nouvel was born in 1945 in Fumel, a village in the Southwest of France. At the age of 30 he opened his own office where he has worked to create a stylistic language separate from that of modernism and post-modernism. Nouvel earned a place for himself amongst the very best in contemporary architecture with his Nemausus residential building, the Arab World Institute in Paris (both in 1987), the Lyon Opera House (1993), the Cartier Foundation in Paris (1994) and the Galeries Lafayette in Berlin (1996). His concert hall in Lucerne, Switzerland was opened in August 1998 and further propelled his recognition and admiration as one of the world’s great architects.