Casual visitors to the Art Institute will barely notice some of the changes when the newly renovated galleries of European art are reopened next Sunday. Those who make a pilgrimage to the museum once or twice a year may sense little more than a freshness, a luster, a feeling of sharpened spatial clarity. Even frequent visitors will not detect every nuance of what has been done.
Yet the subtlety of the work that took three years to finish and cost $6.6 million is a tribute to the sensitivity of the architects and museum staff members who collaborated on the job. The prime mission was to restore the interior of the museum`s central building to its original 1893 Beaux-Arts beauty and to reinstate old floor plans that provided a rational visitor circulation system. In those respects and others, the renovation is a quiet but solid success. No contemporary architectural egos were served on this project.
It may be helpful to point out that what you will see on your first visit to the renewed galleries has no connection with all of the construction on the south side of the sprawling Art Institute complex. The work there is on a new wing that will not open until 1988.
In any case, the first obvious changes in the original museum building are seen immediately after passing through the main entrance on Michigan Avenue. Architect John Vinci was commissioned to renovate the lobby and the grand staircase leading to the second-floor European galleries. Final touches were being made to those areas as this was written.
Vinci is a proven master of his craft who has handled such jobs as the reinstallation of the landmark Chicago Stock Exchange trading room in the museum`s east wing. Now, his taste and authority of method have again served him well. Vinci supervised the restoration of the Michigan Avenue lobby`s coffered ceiling, altered the lighting, remodeled the coat-check room and designed a new marble information desk.
In the skylighted court through which the grand staircase rises, Vinci`s most highly visible accomplishment was installing a permanent new exhibit of more than 50 fragments from famous Chicago buildings both extant and demolished. The display was organized by Pauline A. Saliga, the museum`s assistant curator of architecture, and will deserve separate appraisal a bit later when it is complete in every detail.
Vinci`s grand entrance work also included the removal of second-floor balusters that were originally designed by Louis Sullivan for the Carson, Pirie, Scott store on State Street. The elaborate railing supports were transplanted to the Art Institute in the 1960s in a well-intentioned but esthetically imprudent gesture, because they clashed with the Beaux Arts, Renaissance-derived detailing of the museum.
Removal of the balusters symbolized the paring-away process that was integral to the whole renovation. Over the years, galleries and corridors in the old central building were visually degraded and turned into mazes by the addition of walls and partitions providing storage space and room for heating and air conditioning gear. All of these impediments to a logical floor plan had to be torn out.
Decades of changing museum leadership and shifting notions about architecture also led to the unfortunate stripping away of such original decorative elements as gallery wall moldings and coves. These had to be restored if the 19th Century integrity of the central building was to prevail. Finally, the sometimes leaky, skylight-roofed structure had to be made tight against Chicago`s harsh fluctuations of heat, cold and humidity.
It was decided early on that Vinci`s specialized redesign territory would end at the stairway area. Beyond that point–going into the upstairs galleries and encircling corridors–responsibility would reside with the architecture firm of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM). Heading SOM`s team was Robert A. Hutchins, partner in charge, and Adrian Smith, design partner.
Other architects had tacked incongruous new wings onto the Art Institute over the years, or hacked away at interiors without much respect for design history. John Vinci and Adrian Smith can probably be called the first Chicago architects since World War II to take the 1893 structure seriously.
They are the first, perhaps, because the central Art Institute structure was designed by the Boston firm of Shepley, Rutan and Coolidge (SR&C) and has no connection with Chicago`s stylistic traditions. It has always been an orphan so far as local design historians are concerned.
SR&C was the successor firm created when the great designer, H.H. Richardson, died in 1886. The Art Institute was its first Chicago job, and the Bostonians later designed Chicago`s main library (now the Cultural Center), the Exchange National Bank, Harris Trust and Savings Bank and several buildings at the University of Chicago. SR&C switched styles with alacrity to suit client tastes, whether those happened to run to Tudor or Beaux Arts. Jealous Chicago architects of the early 1900s referred to the Boston designers as ”Simply, Rotten and Foolish.”
When Adrian Smith and his associates at SOM took on the museum renovation assignment three years ago, they respected the spirit as well as the detail of the 1893 structure. Meticulous research and experimental work on an elaborate gallery mock-up preceded final decisions about materials, shapes, colors and lighting.
One of the most striking changes in the European galleries–albeit a nonarchitectural one–is the absence of glass covering the paintings. It was removed at the carefully considered risk of vandalism to better reveal the subtleties of each work. To keep visitors at a slight distance, SOM`s Smith designed bronze stanchions supporting velour ropes (also bronze in color) of the usual museum variety.
Restoration of decorative moldings, coves and other detailing in the gallery rooms was handled tastefully. New glass panel ceilings (with concealed artificial back-up lighting for dark days) diffuse daylight evenly. Ventilation air return vents are sunk inconspicuously into door jambs.
A corridor forming a rectangle in the center of the second floor originally offered visitors a clearly understandable circulation pattern in the Beaux Arts manner. Smith removed walls that blocked portions of the corridor and placed its doorways back into neat alignment. Finding one`s way around from gallery to gallery is far simpler now that dead ends created by old remodelings have been eliminated.
In the process of subtracting superfluities, Smith uncovered a pair of rather nondescript little stairways leading to the building`s attic. Long concealed, the stairways today lead only to spaces filled with mechanical equipment. In restoring and exposing them to public view, however, Smith celebrated the fact that students long ago climbed the stairs to reach the architecture school at the old Armour Institute of Technology, where they studied under the likes of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.
Financial constraints led to compromises in the overall museum restoration. When architects floored new corridors with oak laid in a herringbone pattern, for example, they would like to have torn out the rather fussy parquet floors inside the individual galleries and resurfaced them in the same way. Yet the budget did not allow it.
One visual design shortcoming cannot be blamed on funding limits. Smith devised glassy new walls to replace the existing ones separating the grand entrance stairwell from the second-floor galleries. Walls of some sort are a practical necessity in that area for the control of air conditioning, but Smith`s are scarcely more pleasing than the old ones.
On balance, however, the restoration work gives some of the museum`s most important spaces a renewed richness and sense of order that can only enhance the display of great art. Architects Vinci, Smith and Hutchins and their collaborators in the Art Institute`s administrative-curatorial hierarchy deserve praise for achieving a look that never strays from the track of good taste and a sense of architectural history.
