I love architecture. One of my favorite pastimes is walking through residential neighborhoods in order to ogle brilliantly crafted structures. (Of course, my husband and I also like to point and stare and ponder over how to fix the not so brilliantly structured ones, too.) Armed with only a handful of terms, we point out Craftsmen, Victorians, Tudors, Colonial wannabes. We take note of gusset heights, eave widths, window placement, roof lines. And, one of my personal favorites—cantilevers, those parts of the building that lack foundation support and seem to float into nowhere. But never in all of my life did I imagine it possible to create a cantilever that juts 178 feet without any visible support! (The IRC building codes max out at three feet!) But that’s just what architect Jean Nouvel did. In his design of the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Nouvel, in what he calls the “endless bridge”, cantilevered the fourth floor 178 feet toward the bank of the Mississippi River. It’s eerily stunning. Check out the photgraph titled “View of the Guthrie from Stone Arch Bridge” at Guthrie Theater and tell me if you’d walk under it.



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