Pizazz and purpose

When is a building like a piazza? When it accommodates all the life around it.

MacPhail Center for Music, the latest addition to the Minneapolis Mill District's rich cultural offerings, is such a building. Minneapolis architect James Dayton's design shows that architecture doesn't have to choose between pizazz and purpose.

Or be high-cost. The 55,000-square-foot building cost $16 million.

MacPhail's sophisticated exterior of glass, zinc and Corten steel brings fresh energy to a district heavy with historic and fake-historic brick. But aesthetic high jinks aren't its aim. From its light-filled lobby to the hallways outside the teaching studios, comfort is the byword.

This functional fit is especially welcome for MacPhail, a century-old music education nonprofit whose former home at 1200 LaSalle Av. S. featured cramped studios and a top-floor auditorium that was positively Soviet. Parents waiting for children littered the hallways and lobbies.

In 2001, before the riverfront's recent resurgence, MacPhail secured a corner lot at 2nd Street and 5th Avenue S., half a block from the Milwaukee Depot's landmark train shed. It took seven years and two false starts for the new headquarters to be finished. It was worth the wait. Although it has an idiosyncratic design and uses materials seen nowhere else in the area, it feels right at home.

The layout is simplicity itself. A six-story L-shaped block of studios and offices forms a backdrop for the building's centerpiece -- a flexible 225-seat second-floor auditorium that is wrapped in Corten steel. Tying the two together is a skylit atrium that is the building's hub.

From the outside, all is clear. A glass vestibule draws you in. The large window in the second-floor auditorium cues you to its purpose. The zinc-clad studio block reads like what it is -- floors of studios.

Inside, where you go is equally clear. A concrete stairway leads up to the auditorium, Antonello Hall. The hallway straight ahead leads to the elevators. The Musical Trolley classrooms for preschoolers are immediately to the left, so parents don't have to traipse all over with their little ones. Restrooms are easy to find.

All this activity flows through the atrium, an ingenious space that serves many purposes. The building design seemed to click when Dayton raised the auditorium to the second floor, expanded the stairway to include broad wood seats and turned the main lobby into an informal performance space. A room at the bottom of the stairs acts as a stage with the wood stairs for seating. Or it can be closed off for a class or turned into a lounge for parents.

Every part of this two-level atrium/indoor piazza is equally flexible. On normal days, the second-floor lobby outside Antonello Hall is an inviting lounge for folks to wait for their kids, read or eat a bag lunch. Windows jutting over 5th Avenue offer light and scenery, including a rare view of part of St. Anthony Falls.

The stepped wood seats serve many uses, too. Mothers feed their babies or sit and talk. Someone ties a shoe. Kids climb or lounge. Then, presto, a jam group gathers below and the seats fill with listeners.

A beautiful concert hall

Antonello Hall also can change its configuration. A movable floor system can turn the flat floor into a raked floor or create a pit or stage in the middle of the hall. It's not perfect. Each rake accommodates two rows of chairs, so sightlines from the second row are sometimes blocked. But the flexibility -- and the curtains that can be drawn to dampen the acoustics -- makes the space immensely usable for the variety of music that MacPhail offers, from classical flute to rock drums.

The hall is also beautiful. Lined in Douglas fir and designed for maximum acoustical integrity, it pleases the eye as well as the ear. At first sight it might seem a simple box, but look again. Walls angle slightly in or out, just like the human body. Columns go to the ceiling or stop short. The big window opens to the world beyond.

While the hall is elegant, the rest of the space feels like a giant arts studio. Concrete floors, glass, zinc and Corten steel make the place feel ready for creative action.

Open since January, MacPhail is already feeling the impact of its new home. Paul Babcock, executive vice president, said enrollment in early-childhood classes is up 20 percent from last fall. Group classes, especially voice and music therapy, have grown. Attendance at MacPhail programs such as master classes and faculty recitals has doubled. And outside demand to use Antonello Hall and its lobby is huge, he said.

But the best sign of the building's success is the pleasure of those using it. It works. It's clear. It's filled with light. It's fun.

It is a measure of our disappointment with some of our high-profile new buildings that we go ga-ga over a building that simply works. Dayton's design -- honest, clear and humane -- is architecture at its best.

Longtime Star Tribune staff writer Linda Mack continues to write about architecture.