Bravo Piano – Chicago Plan Looks Like A Winner

The Chicago Art Institute’s expansion plan designed by Renzo Piano and unveiled last week, is a winner, writes Blair Kamin. “The plan calls for a $258 million wing at the southwest corner of Columbus and Monroe Drives that will concentrate the Art Institute’s now-scattered modern and contemporary collections in a 264,000-square-foot temple of steel, glass and limestone. Completion is due in spring 2009. In most cities, this would be a stand-alone structure, the leading art museum. Here, it has been deftly woven into an urban composition that includes the sober classicism of the Art Institute’s 1893 temple along Michigan Avenue and the baroque modernism of Gehry’s Pritzker music pavilion, across Monroe in Millennium Park. That is a balancing act worthy of a circus acrobat carrying a parasol.”