Art Institute’s Modern Wing to Open Next Spring

By Amy Mikel in Arts & Entertainment on Jul 21, 2008 8:43PM

Last week, while at a certain Olympic bid fundraiser at Pritzker, we noticed a strange building in the south skyline. We soon realized that we were looking at the Art Institute’s new Modern Wing, and were surprised at how … done it looked. Which is a good thing, since the Art Institute announced last Thursday that its 264,000 square-foot addition to the museum will be opened to the public on May 16th, 2009.

The new addition will house the museum’s 20th century collections of “modern art, contemporary art, photography, and architecture,” and will expand the total exhibiting space by a third. The Modern Wing will also contain floor-to-ceiling windows, adapted with technology to protect the artwork:

The windows will be equipped with translucent UV-filtering scrims -- shadelike shields strong enough to protect the pieces but thin enough to give museum-goers a hazy but discernable reading of Millennium Park's soaring Pritzker Pavilion. At night, the screens can be adjusted to reveal the sparkle of the lakefront skyscrapers.

The Nichols Bridgeway, a bridge connecting the Modern Wing with Millennium Park, will also open on May 16th. The Art Institute will not charge an admission fee from May 16-22 as a commemoration to the grand opening. [Trib, S-T, image via]