The Art Institute`s new south wing, which will open Saturday, is a visually quiet, tasteful and functionally effective work of architecture. With great care, architect Thomas Beeby has added an important new procession of display spaces to a museum that has been growing in disjointed and not always comely stylistic fashion since it opened in 1893.
Most of the Classically informed architectural detailing of the new wing occurs inside, not on the bland, limestone-clad facades facing Jackson Drive and adjacent railroad tracks. There are reasons for this blandness, of course, and it does not detract from the pleasing experience of passing through Beeby`s interior museum rooms. Thousands will enjoy that experience when they attend the Paul Gauguin show in the special exhibition area to which about a third of the new wing`s gallery space is devoted.
Chicagoans who pay more than desultory attention to the local architecture scene may nonetheless be a little surprised at Beeby`s understated work at the Art Institute. This is, of course, the same Thomas Beeby whose firm of Hammond, Beeby & Babka recently won the competition to design a new downtown main library. It is the Beeby whose library`s exterior is an effervescent outburst of Neo-Classicism, adorned with swags, acroteria and other ornamental devices-even including a sculptured owl.
Why, then, a Beeby museum wing that is so gentle about proclaiming itself to passersby? Because that was what Art Institute officials wanted, and now that the wing is in place, it seems clear that the decision was a wise one.
Very simply, Chicago has one of the most peculiarly sited and oddly laid out major art museums in America. We locals take this for granted, and even visitors from out of town tend not to notice the museum`s sprawl and disparities in architectural style. They enter and leave from the Michigan Avenue side, often not realizing that the Art Institute covers the equivalent of four city blocks and is bisected by a commuter rail line.
Fortunately, this hodgepodge in Grant Park is not totally visible from any single ground level vantage point. Nor can it be comprehended from a height, where it appears as a clutter of irregularly connected boxes and nondescript roofs.
Considered in yet another way, the Art Institute is a Janus (a mythological analogy used by museum director James N. Wood). One of its faces points toward Michigan Avenue, the other toward Columbus Drive.
On the Michigan Avenue side, the Boston architecture firm of Shepley, Rutan and Coolidge was responsible for the original 1893 building, which with a few additions, took its present shape by 1910. The same firm designed Gunsaulus Hall, which spanned the railroad tracks in 1916 and provided the link for eastward museum expansion. By 1924, the firm of Coolidge and Hodgdon had designed McKinlock Court and a suite of galleries named for museum pioneer Charles Hutchinson. Howard Van Doren Shaw, a distinguished Chicago architect, added the handsome Goodman Theater to the complex a year later.
The Art Institute moved toward building a large, unified east wing in 1934. Holabird & Root, Chicago`s most masterful architects of those years, won a competition for the museum job and proposed to turn it out in the Art Moderne Style for which they had become famous. But legal and other problems got in the way, after which the Depression and World War II put a halt to non- essential construction.
It was not until 1959 that museum expansion resumed, this time with a north wing attached to the original building but set back from Michigan Avenue and fronted by a landscaped area of generous dimensions. Holabird & Root designed it in a clunky, almost styleless fashion that afflicted much of architecture in those days-but if the wing`s facades were fairly neutral, they were nevertheless out of sympathy with the 1893 building. When Shaw, Metz & Associates designed a south wing three years later, it turned out to be no better.
And then came architect Walter A. Netsch`s east wing of 1976. Netsch had long been a distinguished partner at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill and was best known for his master planning and design of the University of Illinois Chicago campus. Characteristically, Netsch put his notions about architecture to work at the museum in an idiosyncratic way.
The result was a Netsch wing whose facades along Columbus Drive were glassy, angular, more Modernist in spirit than anything previously done at the museum and almost totally unrelated to the buildings on the Michigan Avenue side. Still, the harshest criticism of Netsch`s wing was reserved for its interior. The architect designed canted stairways that were disorienting enough to require reconstruction. His Arthur Rubloff auditorium still takes knocks for its odd shape and acoustical shortcomings.
It was to this collectively mismatched, scattered and stylistically erratic collection of buildings, then, that Beeby had to address himself-at least in a general way. His mission was to design a big new rectangular wing that would run from the east end of Gunsaulus Hall south to Jackson Drive. And while the wing`s exterior had to rather passively fit the mixed context of its environs, it also had to meet programmatic specifications that were quite demanding.
Early on, museum director Wood and his colleagues considered creating a third major entrance to the Art Institute on the Jackson Drive side of the new wing. Wood says this idea was discarded partly because some visitors at big special exhibitions might tend to move in and out too abruptly instead of enjoying the leisurely procession of grand spaces and works of art beginning at Michigan Avenue. There were security and other logistical considerations, too.
In any case, deciding against the third entrance made a strong exterior design statement even less necessary. There are sets of outward-opening fire doors on the Jackson Drive side and tall windows visible from the street, but nothing much that would mislead you into mounting the stairs leading up to the exit. Wood expects 75 percent of all museum visitors to continue using the Michigan Avenue entrance even after the new wing opens in relative proximity to the Columbus Drive entrance. About 85 percent use Michigan now, while the rest enter from Columbus.
The interior of the new wing, while finely and meticulously detailed, is not intended to present a striking new personality any more than the exterior. It is, instead, faithful to the Classical look of the museum`s original architecture. This look had been ignored and even degraded by insensitive remodeling over the years until 1987, when architects Adrian Smith and John Vinci did their splendid job of renovating the main entrance lobby, grand staircase and galleries of European art with deep respect for the museum`s 1893 beauty. Now Beeby has carried on in the same spirit.
Visitors entering the new three-story wing can immediately proceed by short stairways to either a lower or upper level. The lower floor presents galleries housing European decorative arts and also provides abundant space for carpentry, utilities and other back-of-the-house needs. The upper level showcases the American collection, whose galleries encircle a sculpture court. Ascend a few more stairs and you reach the topmost third level, part of which encircles the top of the two-story sculpture court. It is also on this third level that the huge (19,330 square feet) special exhibition area is located, along with galleries devoted to 20th Century art. The area for special shows is neutral in appearance to prevent any clash with the look of changing exhibits.
The sculpture court doubles as an orientation device. You always know where you are, via-a-vis your relationship to the court. Gazing across it, you enjoy the esthetically tantalizing sight of paintings in rather distant galleries. Beeby has also provided axes whose terminus points are places where major works of art can be displayed. This is all thought out with considerable sensitivity.
In and around the sculpture court, Beeby`s Classical detailing comes into sharpest focus. It is manifested in stylized balusters, Tuscan-like columns and intricate moldings. Materials range from limestone and scagliola
(imitation marble, used for centuries) to stainless steel. Above the sculpture court is a large skylight through which the sun`s rays will pass at changing angles modulated only slightly by venetian blinds whose cant will be changed four times a year. Gallery walls and ceilings are painted gray and off-white. Wooden floors are set in a herringbone parquet.
While the sculpture court does open up the building and sharpen one`s sense of location within it, Beeby provided two other points of orientation by means of windows. On the west wall of the new wing`s topmost level is a loggia-a kind of enclosed porch-which offers views of the older museum buildings and, beyond them, the Michigan Avenue skyline. Windows in the south wall reveal the verdure of Grant Park. The tower-like structure adjoining the east side of the new wing is a nicely disguised boiler exhaust stack.
In sum, Beeby has given the Art Institute a major new addition that does not calculatedly call attention to itself, yet makes a distinguished marriage with the best of the museum`s older spaces. We could hardly have asked for more, and how splendid to put it to the test with Gauguin!
