Word: winging
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...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 Wing, which was proposed by the Institute's former director James Wood and seen to completion by his successor James Cuno, makes the Art Institute the second largest American museum, after the Metropolitan Museum in New York. (See pictures of the new Modern Wing...
...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...
...that shelters the Modern Wing starts with a broad flat canopy of aluminum blades. Those are angled to obstruct southern light while admitting gentler northern light, then deliver it to the third-floor galleries through translucent fabric screens. From outside, it also tops off the building's silhouette with a final flourish: a thin wafer of aluminum afloat on slender steel trusses. Piano likes to call it the "flying carpet...
...Modern Wing from Millennium Park by way of a slender pedestrian bridge that rises to deposit visitors onto a rooftop sculpture terrace that's free of charge. But to be admitted to the galleries, which on most days have an admission fee, you enter at ground level. What you find there is a three-story, glass-roofed atrium, a long processional space that's flanked on the left by a freestanding stairway that zigzags up to galleries on the second and third floors. On the right, temporary exhibition galleries occupy the first floor, with design and architecture above them...
...just a few years of his and Richard Rogers' completion of the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris in 1977. His allegiance is to the working principles of classic Modernism, and in this case with a nod to Chicago Modernism, which he references everywhere. By its horizontal thrust the Modern Wing harks back to the Prairie-style architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright. Its three adjacent bays of glass wall at the end of each floor bear trace elements of the tripartite "Chicago window" that was one of the city's early contributions to skyscraper style. And the whole place speaks...