The Art Institute of Chicago
The Art Institute of Chicago opens its new Modern Wing on May 16, 2009. The Second City will have the second-largest art museum in the United States. Designed by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Renzo Piano, the $300 million, 264,000-square-foot building will bring the museum’s total square footage to approximately 1 million — half the size of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Its most extraordinary feature, called the “flying carpet,” is an aluminum sunshade that floats above the roof of the three-story limestone-and-glass structure. Cantilevered blades block southern rays, while allowing north light to enter the skylights of the galleries below. With glass curtain walls on the north and the south, Piano’s building is all straight lines and right angles. Located at the museum's northeast corner, it comprises two three-story pavilions that together provide 65,000 square feet of new gallery space. A 20,000-square-foot education center occupies the entire first level of the east pavilion; the floors above house galleries for European painting and sculpture and contemporary art. Between the two pavilions, a long street-level court runs from the Modern Wing’s Monroe Street entrance on the north to the existing building on the south. The area includes new galleries for photography, which also has space in the existing building. The east pavilion has the “flying carpet,” but the west pavilion has “the blade,” a 620-foot-long pedestrian bridge that runs from the building’s third floor over Monroe Street into Millennium Park. Designed by Piano, the white-painted structural steel bridge with a rounded bottom was inspired by the hull of a boat. The “blade” moniker derives from the sharp profile of the 15-foot-wide structure. The west pavilion houses galleries for special exhibitions on the first floor and architecture and design on the second floor. The third floor has a fine dining restaurant with a window wall offering spectacular views of Michigan Avenue architecture. It also has an open-air sculpture terrace, where the inaugural exhibit will feature works by Scott Burton. The Art Institute is applying for silver LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certification for the Modern Wing, which is expected to use half the energy of the original structure. A 14,000-square-foot interior garden, between the east pavilion and the older building, is one of the structure’s many green aspects. Looking south, visitors will see a 56-foot-long, fan-shaped wall sculpture commissioned from Ellsworth Kelly installed on the wall of the older building. Renzo Piano has put his stamp on the museum world with his work on the career-making Pompidou Center in Paris, the Menil Collection in Houston and the Beyeler Foundation Museum in Basel, Switzerland. And in 1998 he was awarded the prestigious Pritzker Prize for Architecture. The entrance facade on the north is a window-wall system of double glass intersected by vertical steel mullions that are a realization of Piano's principal goal -- to create a space with as much transparency and light as possible. "Natural light is good for people and good for looking at paintings," he said. "It adds an emotional quality to the experience. It is just more vibrant, more interesting, more three-dimensional than artificial light. What is better than watching a cloud go by and sensing the changes in the weather? And because most of the light in this new building is from the north, it tends to have a uniform brightness."
