ABOVE: the new Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, opening April 17.

The Minneappolis Star-Trib, among others, is getting in some preëmptive gush about the new additions to the Walker Art Center, which has received a $130 million facelift from Swiss architecture firm Herzog & de Meuron (H & dM won the Pritzker prize in 2001). In this article about the renovations, Nazie Eftekhari, the museum board’s vice-chairman, says the additions are “very human in scale,” as opposed to “the Museum of Modern Art where you feel you’re in a gigantic temple of art.”

The Walker Art Center is one among many projects around North America and Europe that’s building things like parks and lounges, theaters and restaurants, gift shops and event facilities—pretty much anything to make them seem more like malls than “temples of art.” Decades of government abuse have left them desperate for revenue, including, in the Walker’s case, a Wolfgang Puck restaurant called—ouch, feel that out-of-date millennial burn—”20.21″. We can hardly fault museums for finding new ways of keeping their doors open, but the Walker is a sign of things to come, and the future has a big, fat gift-shop attached. We’ll just have to wait for April 17 to see the full picture, though. In the meantime, the Walker has provided a cool jargon-filled online gallery of Herzog & de Meuron work, so you can see what their past work has looked like.

Minneapolis Star Tribune: Walker’s shiny new addition is built for art and people [requires registration - we recommend BugMeNot]