Art Institute of Chicago Development News

[edsg25]

The Art Institute has palced ad's in the Trib and S/T announcing that it will be sharing plans with the public for the new Renzo Piano wing. I believe they are to be on exhibit on Memorial Day. If I understood the ad correctly, ground breaking will also be taking place.

Obviously this is a huge thing for the city. I don't think we can underplay the effect this new editon will have on Millennium Park and the way that it will frame it on the south. Tie this in with Block 37 redevelopment a few blocks to the west, we're going to have one intense set of quality development in a relatively small area.

This is exciting stuff.

[Chi_Coruscant]

Edsg25, see post #17 about Art Inst. at OTHER Chicago Downtown stuff thread.

[Chi_Coruscant]

A bridge to the new Millennium

May 31, 2005

BY KEVIN NANCE Architecture Critic Advertisement

The Art Institute of Chicago is building a bridge, literally and figuratively, to Millennium Park.

In a striking addition to plans for the Art Institute's $258 million building expansion, to be unveiled at a groundbreaking ceremony today, the museum is proposing a 900-foot-long, 9-foot-wide pedestrian bridge by architect Renzo Piano that would link Piano's new North Wing with the center of Millennium Park.

To be made of stainless steel with a wood deck and glass walls, the bridge will invite park patrons to enter at what is now a service area for the park's Lurie Garden near "the Bean" and the Pritzker Pavilion, then to walk up on a gentle slope, crossing over Monroe Street and arriving on the roof of the North Wing's three-story west pavilion.

Great views of city
There, visitors will find a newly added sculpture terrace and a restaurant, along with sweeping views of the park to the north, the Michigan Avenue cityscape to the west and Lake Michigan to the east. Visitors can choose between a glass elevator and an escalator to take them down to the North Wing's Monroe Street entrance.

The concept for the bridge and its related features, which added about $50 million to the project's estimated cost, began to develop last summer in response to the splashy debut of Millennium Park, which has been a hit with crowds and critics alike.

"The plans originally included a bridge, but sometime after 9/11 and the downturn of the economy, that went away as a cost-saving measure," said the Art Institute's director, James Cuno. "But when it became clear to everybody that Millennium Park was a massive, obvious success, we were compelled by that success to do something to connect with the park."

'Dream of lightness'
In earlier incarnations, the bridge was envisioned as a more limited affair that would simply provide a way for pedestrians to avoid the Monroe Street traffic, but Cuno and Piano realized the need for a more dramatic gesture with a host of implications both symbolic and practical.

For one thing, Cuno expects as many as 600,000 park patrons will use the bridge annually, of whom perhaps 300,000 will end up entering the museum, thereby significantly expanding its audience.

For another, the bridge -- which corresponds to architect Frank Gehry's more serpentine BP Bridge in Millennium Park -- will serve as an artistic link between the park and the museum. The sleek bridge, whose support system will be partially hidden by trees, will also serve as a highly theatrical expression of Piano's aesthetic goal for the North Wing: to create the illusion of airy weightlessness and levitation.

"The connection with the park becomes more interesting than it used to be, because that bridge is flying, rising much higher above Monroe Street," Piano said in an interview from his studio in Genoa, Italy. "In the park, the bridge starts near the lattice for Frank Gehry's bandshell, which also has such a feeling of lightness. My bridge is dreaming that same dream of lightness, of light. This is my idea in air."

The proposal for the bridge is technically preliminary, since the museum's board of trustees and city planners have yet to give final approval and the money has yet to be raised. But Cuno said he is "absolutely confident" the bridge will be built as part of the North Wing project, which begins construction this year and is set to open in 2009.

Daley is said to like plan

Cuno said the plan for the bridge is supported by Mayor Daley, who is scheduled to appear at today's groundbreaking ceremony, and by Millennium Park officials, including Ed Uhlir, the park's design director.

"I think it could be an elegant, sort of transparent structure and could be done without disrupting other elements of the park," Uhlir said.

John H. Bryan, chairman of both the Art Institute's board of trustees and Millennium Park Inc., the philanthropic group that raised the park's private funding, said the bridge's symbolic linking of buildings by Gehry and Piano makes a powerful statement.

"Having these two great architects facing off across the street from each other just adds to Chicago's reputation for being a world-class city for architecture," Bryan said.

AT A GLANCE

The Art Institute of Chicago's new North Wing:

Where: The northeast quadrant of the Art Institute property, at the corner of Monroe Street and Columbus Drive, directly across from Millennium Park's Lurie Garden.

Estimated cost: $258 million, of which $170 million has been raised.

Scheduled to open: Spring 2009.

Size: 264,000 total square feet, including 65,000 square feet of gallery space and 20,000 square feet for educational activities. The new wing will increase the size of the Art Institute by about a third and will house the museum's modern and contemporary art collections, including photography, film, video and architecture.

What it will be made of: Exterior walls will be Indiana limestone, glass and steel. The canopy over the east pavilion will be made of aluminum.

Most striking design feature: The "flying carpet" canopy over the east pavilion will capture north light and deliver it to the skylights of the top-floor galleries.

Most recently added design feature: A stainless steel pedestrian bridge, which will begin in Millennium Park, cross Monroe Street and lead to the roof of the North Wing's west pavilion.

What the interior will look like: The new wing is divided into three attached components, including a three-story east pavilion for galleries and museum education; a three-story west pavilion housing galleries, visitor services, a boardroom, sculpture terrace and restaurant, and a central, double-height concourse connecting the two pavilions and creating a "main street" into the museum.

[The Urban Politician]

^Purely awesome. I"m speechless

[Latoso]

Are there any renderings?

[ThirdCoast312]

The Art Institute expansion made front page on the arts section of the NY times. Here's the article from the more proffesional and respectable source.

Light and Airiness for Art Institute of Chicago's New Wing

By ROBIN POGREBIN
Published: May 31, 2005
An aluminum canopy that the architect likens to a "flying carpet" will float like a parasol over Renzo Piano's planned three-story addition for the Art Institute of Chicago, a design to be unveiled today.


The Art Institute will present the design in conjunction with the formal groundbreaking for the new $258 million building, which is to rise in the northeast quadrant of the museum's site, at the corner of Monroe Street and Columbus Drive. The addition will increase the institute's size by one third and is to be completed in the spring of 2009.

James Cuno, the museum's president and director, said that Mr. Piano's glass, steel and limestone design would add a contemporary identity to the institute's 1893 Beaux-Arts building on Michigan Avenue. "The openness of the building, the lightness of the building is of a character appropriate to the 21st century," Mr. Cuno said.

"For some people, that is more inviting than the stony nobility of the 19th century," he added. "It is of its time the way the 1893 building is of its time."

The 264,000-square-foot addition will house the museum's modern and contemporary galleries, including space for photography, film, video and architecture and museum education.

In designing the building, Mr. Piano said he sought to honor the institute's original architecture. "I wanted to introduce beside that sense of massiveness, the sense of lightness," he said in a telephone interview from his office in Genoa, Italy.

The northern facade features a monumental glass curtain wall and the "flying carpet," a 216-foot-square sun-shading structure suspended over the upper-floor galleries.

"You have this tension between the strength of the walls and the stone and the lightness and transparency of those elements that are flying above ground," Mr. Piano said.

A pedestrian bridge of stainless steel, wood decking and glass railings - shaped "like the blade of a knife," the architect said - will lead from Millennium Park across Monroe Street to the Art Institute's rooftop restaurant and outdoor sculpture terrace.

The museum, founded in 1879 as both a museum and a school, boasts a renowned collection of Impressionist paintings, 20th-century art, old master drawings, Chinese jades, photography and textiles and architectural drawings and models. Originally on the southwestern corner of State and Monroe Streets, the institute opened at its current site at Michigan Avenue and Adams Street in 1893.

Mr. Piano said there was something potentially intimidating about designing an addition to a historic building in a historic city known for legendary architects like Daniel Burnham, Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright and Mies van der Rohe. "You grow up with this kind of mythology, the robustness of those buildings, around Michigan Avenue," he said. "When you approach a job in Chicago, you have to keep in mind all that."

At the same time, Mr. Piano said he tried not to be awed by the weightiness of the original institute building, designed by Shepley, Rutan & Coolidge of Boston. "As an Italian, you may get paralyzed by legacy or heritage," he said. "Every time I walk through Venice or Florence I have the temptation to give up. If I have to be that good, why don't I go sailing?"

"At the same time, you need the freedom to take off," he added.

The institute's contemporary collection will be displayed on the building's second level, a loftlike space with concrete floors and an opaque ceiling. The third floor, which is to contain the institute's modern collection, draws natural lighting from the "flying carpet" above. These galleries will allow for free-flowing circulation and flexibility, like the installation of temporary walls. "You have to create a sense of instinctive orientation," Mr. Piano said. "You don't have to read a panel to know where to go. You just go."

The underground level will be used for storage and for loading areas.

The building will be organized along a 300-foot north-south internal "main street" from Monroe Street to Regenstein Hall on Jackson Boulevard, where the museum's space for temporary exhibitions is located.

The new entrance on Monroe Street is intended to extend the axis created by Millennium Park, which is anchored on the opposite end by the Jay Pritzker Pavilion, a band shell designed by Frank Gehry.

In tandem with the presentation of the model, an exhibition opening today at the Art Institute - "Zero Gravity: The Art Institute, Renzo Piano and Building for a New Century," on view through Oct. 2 - traces the design process.

So far, the Art Institute has raised $170 million in gifts and pledges toward the $285 million goal and now begins a broader public campaign.



Above, model of the Art Institute of Chicago's expansion, showing, at center, the "flying carpet" roof.




Section model showing "flying carpet" roof of the new wing.

[NYC2ORDGuy]

Is anyone else besides me upset that the newly proposed bridge would mar views of the Michigan Avenue streetwall from within Millennium Park?

Last year the museum had expected a big increase in visitors when Millennium Park opened next door, and they were let down in a big way when that never happened. I think the bridge is less about the Art Institute wanting to add something special to the character of the park and transparently more about wanting to suck visitors from the park in any way possible. Honestly, plopping a bridge down in the MIDDLE of the park to siphon visitors to your museum's front door and calling it art.

I mean, how about a well thought-out crosswalk on Monroe? Or perhaps a public-relations campaign? A few directional signs in the park perhaps? A flyer or two?

There's piggy backing and then there's piggy backing.

[Steely Dan]

i think using the bridge as a means to suck people into the museum is it's sole reason for existence, and i don't see a damn thing wrong with that. i also wouldn't worry about views of michicagn avenue being ruined, in fact i think that a nicely designed bridge could be a wonderful addition to those views (think about the views of the streetwall from the bridge itself!). the bridge concept itself is good, what matters now is its design.

[edsg25]

is covering the metra tracks to the west of the addition (along Monroe) part of the AI's plans?

[Steely Dan]

Originally Posted by edsg25

is covering the metra tracks to the west of the addition (along Monroe) part of the AI's plans?

from what i understand, that was part of the original scheme, but the covering of the IC ROW has been dropped from current plans due to expense.

[BVictor1]

Here are some shots of the model and renderings of the new addition of The Art Institute, which are on display at top of the grand staircase. I would advise anyone interested to take a trek down to the museum. They also have the construction and engineering documents on display.

[BVictor1]

May 31, 2005
Previous Story | Next Story

Art Institute unveils design for new $258M wing
JPMorgan Chase to be founding civic underwriter with $5M donation


(AP) – The Art Institute of Chicago on Tuesday unveiled the final design of a new building that will house contemporary and modern collections and also launched the public aspect of a fund-raising campaign that is $115 million short of its goal.

It also announced that JPMorgan Chase & Co. is the building's founding civic underwriter and has made the largest corporate contribution so far at $5 million. The hope is that some person or organization will donate $50 million or more for the naming rights to the new building.

Construction will start this week on the 264,000-square-foot expansion, which is scheduled for completion in the spring of 2009. Italian architect Renzo Piano designed the $258 million glass, steel and limestone building that will feature a pedestrian bridge linking Michigan Avenue, the museum and the wildly popular new Millennium Park.

"You'll have indoors, outdoors, art and nature as one common experience," museum president James Cuno said after the designs were revealed at a ceremony outside the Art Institute.

John H. Bryan, chairman of the Art Institute's board of trustees, said $170 million has been raised toward the goal of $285 million.

The Art Institute is the largest "encyclopedic museum" between Washington, D.C. and the West Coast, and the new north wing will attempt to attract people already visiting Millennium Park, Cuno said.

He added that if only 10 percent of the park's projected 3 million annual visitors use the bridge to enter the museum, the Art Institute could attract another 300,000 attendees.

The wing will add about 65,000 square feet of gallery space to the museum. Currently it has more than 230,000 square feet of space devoted to exhibiting art.

The new building will allow the Art Institute to showcase its impressive collection of modern and contemporary works in one location, officials said.

"People say art of their time is greatly fascinating to them," Bryan said. "I think it will be an enormous revelation for people to see the early modern collection we've got," including works of photography and architecture.

The now-vacant Goodman Theatre building will be demolished to make room for the new wing at the corner of Monroe Street and Columbus Drive. The theater company moved to a new location five years ago.

The building will be divided into three spaces: a three-story east pavilion for galleries and museum education; a three-story west pavilion for galleries, visitor services, a boardroom, the sculpture terrace, a winter garden and a dining facility; and a court located in between the pavilions to enhance circulation.

Piano's first designs for the project were unveiled in the spring of 2001, but the expansion was delayed after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Piano said an aluminum canopy on the building - he calls it a "flying carpet" - will capture light and deliver it to skylights in the top-floor galleries. The 900-foot-long stainless steel bridge will resemble a knife, cutting straight from Millennium Park to the sculpture terrace on the third floor of the new building.

"In the end, everything we do is really part of the park," said Piano, a winner of the prestigious Pritzker Architecture Prize.

Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley said the new building will not only house great works of art, "but will be a work of art in itself."


Copyright 2005 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast or redistributed.

[ChicagoLover]

Given that no one is complaining about the old Goodman being destroyed, I assume that structure is of no great architectural or historic value?

[Latoso]

It's gonna look great, but the bridge won't be for the faint of heart. I read that it's only going to be about 8 feet wide and who knows what kind of handrails it might have. (Possibly transparent?)

[Chi_Coruscant]

I am starting to be more interested about the bridge over Art Institute expansion.

[The Urban Politician]

The bridge, if designed well, could potentially have an astounding effect. Imagine the appearance of people walking on it, almost as they're floating, 3 stories in the air--all with the backdrop of Mich Avenue and Millennium Park.

Is the Art Institute using this to improve attendance? Of course it is--but does it really hurt anything? If designed well, it could assuredly have a dramatic effect on the area.

My only question is--how are they going to have all-glass handrailings? What if the friggin glass breaks?

[Steely Dan]

Originally Posted by The Urban Politician

My only question is--how are they going to have all-glass handrailings? What if the friggin glass breaks?

there are many different varieities of glass available these days, and some of them are astoundingly strong.

[Azn_chi_boi]

wow... The art insitute, one of the last place I thought it would expand. The renderings looks good. Can'twait as always.

[Jasonhouse]

Originally Posted by sharptent

there are many different varieities of glass available these days, and some of them are astoundingly strong.

Yep... There's even loadbearing glass.




I must say, I'm not too fond of this design at the moment. Reminds me too much of a jail for some reason. It's very 'cagey', if you know what I mean.

[BVictor1]

I'm suprised that noone posted these article about the Art Institute expansion by Blair Kamin.

Museum bridge to connect art, popular park
Addition, bridge will be works of art themselves

By Blair Kamin
Tribune architecture critic
Published May 31, 2005

Seeking to capitalize on Millennium Park's soaring popularity, the Art Institute of Chicago on Tuesday will unveil the final design for its soon-to-be-built new wing, including a superlong footbridge that would shoot like a glistening knife over the park's south end and deposit thousands of parkgoers on the building's rooftop.

The stainless steel span, still in conceptual stages but already endorsed by Mayor Richard M. Daley, is a dramatic new element of the $258 million expansion, which is expected to open in spring 2009 and will provide a concentrated showcase for the museum's now-scattered collection of modern and contemporary art.

Known as the north wing, the sparkling temple of steel, glass and limestone will be built at the southwest corner of Monroe and Columbus Drives, on a blighted, sunken site that contains the historic but vacant Goodman Theatreok--bdk. It will be the Art Institute's largest structure since its familiar Beaux-Arts edifice along Michigan Avenue rose in 1893 atop rubble from the Great Chicago Fire.

"What we really have here is a new museum. It's a museum of 20th Century Aart. It will look like Chicago has this temple of modern art that the world didn't know we have," said John Bryanok--bdk, the chairman of the museum's board and its chief fundraiser. He still needs to raise more than $100 million for the project, which was delayed by the economic downturn that followed the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Workers will begin erecting construction barriers on Wednesday, and the old Goodman Theatre building will be demolished in the fall, said James Cuno, the museum's president.

Museum officials view the proposed bridge, designed by the expansion's celebrated architect, Renzo Piano of Italy, as a way to lure crowds from neighboring Millennium Park, which will mark its first anniversary on July 16. According to a study done for the City of Chicago, the 24.5-acre park is expected to draw 3 million visitors this year.

"The whole impetus to break ground now and to develop this bridge ," Cuno said, "was the palpable success of Millennium Park," Cuno said.

Straight as a knife when seen from above, with an estimated length of 800 to 900 feet, the gently sloping bridge is sure to invite comparisons with Millennium Park's other destination span, the snaking, 960-foot-long BP Bridge by Los Angeles architect Frank Gehry. That bridge is as much a place as a passageway, inviting parkgoers to stop and take in views of the park, Lake Michigan and the skyline.

"It's like a lazy river moving around," Piano said by telephone from his office in Genoa, Italy. "In some ways, this is my response to that one."

A winner of the Pritzker Architecture Prize, his field's highest honor, Piano has a credit list of finished museums that includes the high-tech Pompidou Center in Paris (for which he was co-designer), the serene Menil Collection in Houston and the graceful Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas. His recent success at garnering U.S. museum commissions has even spawned a backlash, with critics complaining that he represents a default "safe choice" for risk-averse museum directors.

Yet his bold bridge plan is anything but timid, marking the biggest change in the Art Institute's expansion blueprint, which was first made public in the spring before the Sept. 11 attacks.

The subsequent economic downtown slowed fundraising, forcing the museum to postpone a groundbreaking originally envisioned for early 2003. In addition, the expansion's overall size has shrunken to 264,000 square feet from a planned 290,000.

Still, the north wing will increase the museum's gallery space by roughly one third-adding 65,000 square feet of display space-and the wing retains enough heft to qualify as a stand-alone museum. When completed, it will be more than 100,000 square feet larger than Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art. The budget will be princely, nearly $1,000 a square foot.

And while other museums have been forced to cancel or suspend ambitious expansions-last weekweek of may 22--bdk, the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. put on hold its plans for a flashy, $110 millionsted $60 million-ap had it wrong--bdk Gehry-designed addition-the Art Institute has cobbled together enough support from its inner circle of donors to get the privately funded north wing off the ground.

The museum has gifts and pledges of $170 million for the wing. However, it still must raise another $115 million from foundations, corporations and the public to meet its overall $285 million goal, which includes funds for an endowment and enough to pay for the bridge. Museum officials estimate that the span will cost either the same or less than Gehry's bridge, which cost $14.5 million. And the museum continues to troll for a lead gift of at least $50 million. Whoever gives that much gets their name on the building.

"We'll start at $50 [million]," Cuno joked. "We'll take $75 [million]." The timing of the museum's fundraising campaign is hardly coincidental. Civic pride should be running high Tuesday night when the billionaire Pritzker family awards this year's Pritzker Architecture Prize at Millennium Park's the Gehry-designed Pritzker Pavilion.

The ceremony and the park's approaching first anniversary will enable Bryan, the fundraising wizard behind the $475 million urban pleasure ground, to make the case that Chicagoans should open their wallets to support the city's next grand project-which happens to be right next door.

"It's the most important civic building built in Chicago in the last 100 years," said Bryan, his sales pitch already honed.

Piano's final plan, which will be introduced at a news press conference at the museum Tuesday, retains key elements from 2001 as well as significant refinements.

The signature design element remains the architect's "flying carpet" canopy, a sprawling sunshade that will float atop thin steel columns and overhang the building. As fleshed out by Piano, the sunshade will consist of scores of curving aluminum blades that are supposed to screen out direct sunlight and deliver softly diffused natural light to the north wing's third-floor galleries.

The sunshade and an energy-saving, double-layered glass wall facing Millennium Park should contrast sharply with the north wing's massive limestone walls, which evoke the museum's earlier buildings.

All the modern elements will fortify Piano's chief aesthetic theme-a highly transparent, "light" building that seems to defy gravity and opens to nature.

In that spirit, a light-infused, north-south "main street" will take visitors from the new building's Monroe Drive entrance to the Rice Building along Jackson Boulevard, which houses the museum's main temporary exhibition space.

To the east will be a three-story pavilion for galleries and museum education. To the west will be another three-story pavilion, its rooftop lined with a sculpture garden, winter garden and glassed-in dining facility with skyline and lake views.

The bridge leading to these attractions, which departs from Piano's earlier plan for a much shorter span, would begin deep in the park, a full city block north of Monroe.

Siphoning crowds from the nearby Cloud Gate sculpture and the Pritzker Pavilion, the narrow span would rise above what is now a fenced-in service yard for the park's Lurie Garden before crossing Monroe, more than 20 feet above the street.

Its gradual slope would permit people in wheelchairs to use it. Glass walls would emphasize the bridge's lightness and transparency, a feature not likely to be lost on lakefront advocates who want open views of Lake Michigan. The bridge's path already has been adjusted to mollify Millennium Park officials.

Millennium Park project design director Ed Uhlir said the Art Institute and Piano heeded his request to move the bridge slightly to the west so it would not disturb the western edge of the Lurie Garden.

"I support the idea for the bridge," Uhlir said. Once people cross Monroe and reach the museum's rooftop's attractions, they could take an escalator or elevator to the north wing's first floor, where they could buy a ticket to enter the museum, head back to the park or go elsewhere.

"If there are 3 million people a year [in Millennium Park]," Cuno said, "let's say 20 percent of them cross that bridge. That's 600,000 people coming over to the Art Institute side. If half of them descend and go into the museum, that's 300,000 people."

When the north wing opens, he expects museum attendance, now about 1.3 million annually, to jump to 1.8 million or more.

Museum officials have not yet shown the bridge proposal to advocacy groups such as Friends of the Parks. In a news release issued by the museum, Daley, praised the design as a "21st Century connection between the Art Institute and the city."

A spokeswoman for the city's Department of Planning and Development said the bridge will need an amendment to the planned development legislation for the expansion that the City Council approved. That would require assent from the city's Plan Commission and the council, as well as public hearings.

Bkamin@tribune.com