Chicago's Art Institute Expands, with Elegance

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James Iska

The façade of the new addition to the Art Institute of Chicago, designed by Renzo Piano

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The one that shelters the Modern Wing starts with a broad flat canopy of aluminum blades. Those are angled to obstruct southern light while admitting gentler northern light, then deliver it to the third-floor galleries through translucent fabric screens. From outside, it also tops off the building's silhouette with a final flourish: a thin wafer of aluminum afloat on slender steel trusses. Piano likes to call it the "flying carpet," and you can see why.

Piano has placed floor-to-ceiling glass walls at the north and south ends of his building, which introduce light directly into some of the galleries through a scrim that can be raised on overcast days. The window walls also admit some powerful views of Millennium Park, including a huge vista of the billowing steel panels of Frank Gehry's wonderful Pritzker band shell, which comes at you like a breaker on the beach at Santa Monica.

You can get to the Modern Wing from Millennium Park by way of a slender pedestrian bridge that rises to deposit visitors onto a rooftop sculpture terrace that's free of charge. But to be admitted to the galleries, which on most days have an admission fee, you enter at ground level. What you find there is a three-story, glass-roofed atrium, a long processional space that's flanked on the left by a freestanding stairway that zigzags up to galleries on the second and third floors. On the right, temporary exhibition galleries occupy the first floor, with design and architecture above them, and on the third floor, a restaurant and that sculpture terrace.

The dimensions of this atrium are pretty compelling. The long aisle just about siphons you into the museum. But the high expanses of bare white wall, a Modernist fetish, are a little bland. You wonder what might have been done in this space by Herzog and de Meuron, the designers of the Olympic Stadium in Beijing, who don't mind jolting their surfaces a bit.

But contorted form and elaborate surfaces dropped out of Piano's vocabulary long ago, within just a few years of his and Richard Rogers' completion of the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris in 1977. His allegiance is to the working principles of classic Modernism, and in this case with a nod to Chicago Modernism, which he references everywhere. By its horizontal thrust the Modern Wing harks back to the Prairie-style architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright. Its three adjacent bays of glass wall at the end of each floor bear trace elements of the tripartite "Chicago window" that was one of the city's early contributions to skyscraper style. And the whole place speaks the language of Mies van der Rohe, the German Modernist who fled to Chicago in the 1930s and filled the city with his resolute exercises in glass and steel.

It goes without saying that Gehry's pinwheeling band shell in Millennium Park couldn't be more unlike Piano's firm Cartesian box. Seeing them across from each other makes you think of those neighborhoods in Rome where the Baroque rubs shoulders with the classical, but with the difference that the Gehry and the Piano were built just a few years apart. Now they face each other as signs of the immense range of architectural practice these days — and of the fact that there's more than one road to the peak.

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