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The Walker Art Center is considered one of the top modern art museums in the nation. Originally founded by local lumberman Thomas Walker at the current location in 1927, it was the first public art gallery in the Upper Midwest.
The current Walker building was designed by Edward Larrabee Barnes in 1971. Barnes studied in the Bahaus minimalist-style of high modernism. The building's unexciting exterior is outweighed by the interior functionality of several art galleries spiraling around a central core.
The new addition to the Walker was done in 2006 by the Swiss team of Herzog and de Meuron. The boxy, irregularly-shaped structure is coated with embossed aluminum mesh panels. The exterior skin and general shape of the addition evokes an image of an enormous robot head preparing to devour Hennepin Ave.
