Art Institute Builds on Success

By Justin Sondak in Arts & Entertainment on Jun 17, 2005 7:30PM

Chicago is the gifted child of the architecture world who can’t just settle for being top of its high school class. Recent developments at the Art Institute of Chicago, the worldwide praise for Millennium Park and the perennial success of the City’s Great Spaces and Places weekend make us feel like proud parents sending Junior to the university. Breaking ground on its new north wing, the Art Institute is embarking on the most significant expansion in its history. By 2009, the current building will connect to a majestic set of 21st century pavilions housing new space for modern and contemporary art, photography, temporary exhibits and architectural art. Helping make this vision a reality is newly hired architecture curator Joseph Rosa, who’s been wooed away from a similar post at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

While the construction will deprive us of the much-loved Chagall windows for the next few years, Chicagoist believes the new north wing is long overdue. If expansion is good enough for McCormick Place and Soldier Field, it's good enough for the Art Institute-- and we have faith that this will turn out so much better than Soldier Field. Mr. Rosa has a golden opportunity to deliver far more than the underwhelming “Classics of Chicago Architecture” exhibit in a small basement hallway and the edifying but well-hidden look at Chicago’s post-war building boom “1945: Creativity and Crisis.”

Ascend the museum’s grand staircase and glimpse the Art Institute's future. “Zero Gravity” recreates architect Renzo Piano’s studio with impressively rendered drawings of the future addition along with thick volumes of technical documents and blueprints for the well-initiated. Just enter via the Michigan Avenue doors and look for the big floating blueprints.

If these growing pains are making you nostalgic for our region’s architectural gestation, check out ArchiTech Gallery’s new Modernism exhibit, celebrating the bad boys of mid-century architecture—Frank Lloyd Wright, Alfonso Iannelli, Henry P. Glass and others—and their ‘newfangled’ designs. And if you’ve always wanted to discuss the skyline with an NPR broadcaster and the City’s cultural historian to the sounds of ragtime, make your way over to the Cultural Center next Wednesday for “The Sound of Architecture,” exploring the music you should be hearing when you look at beautiful buildings.

"Zero Gravity" is ongoing and "1945: Creativity and Crisis" runs through January 2006, at the Art Institute of Chicago, 111 South Michigan Avenue. Admission is $12 for adults, $7 for students and seniors, free on Tuesdays.

"The Sound of Architecture" will be presented at the Chicago Cultural Center’s Claudia Cassidy Theater, 78 East Washington Street, Wednesday, June 22 at 7:30pm. Tickets are $30, $15 for enthusiastic Chicago Public Radio supporters.