Word: modernism
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Somebody who can do it and then some is Renzo Piano, the Italian architect whose refined new addition to the Art Institute opened over the weekend to large crowds and a big outdoor party. The $294 million Modern Wing, built to house the Institute's great collection of 20th and 21st century work, is a complicated exercise in reconciliation. A resolutely modern building, it not only manages to gently introduce itself into the greenery of Chicago's Millennium Park but also draws in three tricky neighbors - the original Art Institute, the active commuter railway lines that run between them...
Piano is exaggerating only a bit when he says that "Chicago invented modern architecture, invented modernity after the fire." The Great Fire of 1871 wiped away large stretches of the city and opened them for rebirth in a modern industrial and high-rise idiom. There was nothing particularly modern about the original Art Institute, a Beaux Arts culture palace from 1893. But it symbolized the determination of the city's élite to rebuild Chicago as a cultural force to be reckoned with. Over the years it was expanded frequently. Now the 264,000-sq.-ft. addition of the Modern...
...designs may not push the envelope, but they seal it with a kiss. His best buildings have a delicacy inseparable from their tensile power. As Piano likes to say, "Beauty is not romantic. Beauty is very strong." Put in those terms, it would be fair to say that the Modern Wing is one of his strongest American projects ever, his best since the superb little Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas...
...whole trajectory of modern art for the last 100 years has been toward the concept of mental construction, and blind photography comes from that place," says the show's "sighted" curator Douglas McCulloh, himself a photographer. "They're creating that image in their head first - really elaborate, fully realized visions - and then bringing some version of that vision into the world for the rest of us to see." A sample of the photographs posted by TIME.com received a huge amount of attention. (See pictures by blind photographers here...
There's nothing more natural than being born. There's also nothing quite as fraught. A whole lot can go wrong during that long and tortuous journey from the womb to the world. Modern medicine can eliminate a lot of the risk, but in doing so, it can also turn what could be a joyous experience for the mother into the equivalent of an all-day appendectomy...