Architecture Beat: Art Institute of Chicago's Modern Wing

The problem with architects and the museums they design is usually one of excess. With large endowments and the need to appear cutting edge, big museums will often give an architect unprecedented freedom to cobble together whatever he wants in his most iconic and daring style. While this freedom might create spectacular buildings (cf. Gehry's Guggenheim-Bilbao and Calatrava's addition to the Milwaukee Art Museum), do the sweeping and oddly angled walls of these buildings create good museums? Do you visit a museum for the building itself or for what the building contains? And isn't wrong that there be competition between the two in the first place?

Renzo Piano avoids even the appearance of architectural preemption with his new Modern Wing of the Chicago Art Institute. The outside soars with airiness almost floating off the ground. The windows are all tall and vertical, the beams regular and white. Instead of a roof, an expanse of white lattice tops off the building. Reinforcing the lightness, a long, sinewy ramp connects Millennium Park to the upper floor of the addition. I don't remember seeing any structural support for the bridge, but it didn't look like it needed it at all.


















But while the outside wows, the inner galleries sparkle with neutrality. The angles are all orthogonal, the rooms large but never large enough to dwarf the art hanging inside them. The art hangs evenly on the walls. All of the galleries sit off a large central hall way that spans up all three floors. It's a nice mediating room between oversized dimensions of the outside and the personal dimensions of the galleries. I think my favorite part of the inside is the third floor's ceiling. Piano uses a glass ceiling to let us see the latticing above. It makes for a space that is clearly indoors until you look up and see the sky. The inside is so subdued that after the art on the walls, the biggest visual draw is skyline visible outside the windows. The tall windows allow for the entire height of the buildings to be viewed. It's a perfectly composed cityscape scene.

Everybody's fave architect Frank Lloyd Wright said that forms always follows function. Go to any house of his, and you can clearly see that he never followed his own maxim. His chairs are uncomfortable, his houses sag and creak, but ironically, his Guggenheim museum synthesizes the two in that building's iconic, long, spiraling-skyward central gallery. It's ironic because so many other architects have fallen off the wagon when asked to make such grand spaces. Renzo Piano fortunately defied the odds with The Modern Wing.