Thinking outside of the brick box

Akron, Ohio: Transformers are a popular line of robot characters, known to children through cartoons, video games, comic books, movies and especially toys.

They are machines that morph, metallic humanoid creatures that unfold out of the shell of a car, truck, cellphone or some other everyday object.

Little boys, who can't get enough of them, seem to respond to the bristling, sci-fi menace hidden inside the familiar lines of an ordinary toy.

That primal appeal, the magic of unfolding something angular and energetic and maybe even violent out of an innocuous shell, also defines the aesthetic of architect Wolf Prix -and a whole generation of so-called deconstructivist architects.

With its metal-mesh-encased arms, its chrysalis glass core and its long thorax of aluminum-covered gallery space, Prix's new addition to the Akron Art Museum feels biomorphic and mechanical at the same time.

It is a discombobulated building pulsing with space-age energy, operating on different levels and at wild angles. And it sits next to a simple brick box, the old Akron museum that it dwarfs and expands - which could be the box the toy came in.

Inaugural project

Although Prix's Austrian firm, Coop Himmelb(l)au, has been around since 1968, the Akron museum is its first public project in North America. The firm's name, with the silly parenthesis that suggests someone there may have ingested too much literary theory, offers a range of meanings from "building heaven'' to "sky blue.'' Its aesthetic emphasises architecture that defies gravity, that is intentionally counterintuitive and otherworldly.

Decades ago, in the heady and anarchic years of the '70s and '80s, Coop Himmelb(l)au's lead architects were given to writing manifestos, and a small sample of their prose may help explain why it took them so long to get a major commission in the United States: "Architecture has to be cavernous, fiery, smooth, hard, angular, brutal, round, delicate, colourful, obscene, lustful, dreamy, attracting, repelling, wet, dry and throbbing.''

Over the years, however, the rhetoric has mellowed, and so, last Monday, Prix pulled a chair to a favourite spot in the atrium of his first major American building and admired the view. Asked whether the long wait in this country for a major building by Coop Himmelb(l)au had anything to do with its paper trail, he demurs.

"Finally it happens," he says.

Finally indeed. The Akron Art Museum is a fascinating building and a major addition to the landscape of this small Rust Belt city. The new addition sits next to the Renaissance-revival brick post office, built in 1899, that has served since 1981 as the museum's offices and exhibition space. Very little of its impressive collection of post-Second World War American art could be displayed in the old digs. The expansion, which cost a frugal $35 million (Dh128.5 million), has tripled the museum's size.

The architectural dilemma - again, the usual one with these kinds of expansions - was how to fuse the new with the old. The solution: Don't bother. Even museum Director Mitchell Kahan says the buildings are "smashed together.''

The old museum is the kind of dutiful and well-made building that every city should be eager to preserve, but it is nothing you'll ever find in a picture book of great architecture. So Coop Himmelb(l)au tore a great, square chunk off one side, attached the glass atrium to the hole and then built a fantastical roof, in the form of four metallic arms that glow purple at night, one of which extends all the way over the old building.

That arm could be doing any number of things. One might say it is an attempt to integrate the new building with the old, a protective arm shading the brick box. You might also see it as patting the old building on the head, perhaps a little condescendingly. Or is this a mechanical barfly extending a boozy limb over a simple, brick girl, whispering, "Have you ever kissed a radical European deconstructivist architect, baby?''

Historical buildings

In any case, one senses a kind of joke in that arm, a veiled criticism by an Old World architect of the New World fetish for "historical'' buildings that are, in relative terms, inconsequential blips on the greater timeline.

"People love the old building here,'' Prix says, in a monotone. "They don't want to destroy it.''

Ohio has an impressive architectural record, so it shouldn't be so surprising that Akron has built such a confrontational new structure. There are major buildings in the state by the usual brand-name architects (Frank Gehry, I.M. Pei).

A huge, $258 million (Dh947.4 million) expansion, by Rafael Vinoly, is underway at the Cleveland Museum of Art. And there are important buildings by "difficult'' architects, including museums by Zaha Hadid (in Cincinnati) and Peter Eisenman (in Columbus).