Architect Josef Paul Kleihues is a distinguished man and quite sure of himself, but he keeps peering over his shoulder, anyway.
Kleihues is the designer of the new Museum of Contemporary Art going up at 220 E. Chicago Ave. The $46.5 million project is his first in this country. Its rugged outer walls are in place and the interior spaces are starting to shape up, 10 months before completion.
Kleihues has been commuting here regularly from Berlin for the past two years–and confides that whenever he visits the project, “I think of Mies van der Rohe looking at it through his window across the street.”
The late Ludwig Mies van der Rohe lived on East Pearson Street just steps from the museum site. German-born like Kleihues, Mies was the emperor of Chicago architecture in the middle of this century.
Kleihues is well aware that the museum faces on Mies van der Rohe Way, a short north-south street named for the architect. Indeed, suggests Kleihues, why not retitle the street Mies van der Rohe Plaza? The museum will have a blockwide plaza on that side; a grand staircase 16 feet high is already in place.
Kleihues, 62, is not a “Miesian.” He says he thinks of himself as a “poetic rationalist.” But he does admire Mies’ art and innovation as well as the work of such old-time Chicago architects as William Le Baron Jenney and Louis Sullivan. The museum design seeks its place somewhere in that notable line.
Among its non-Miesian aspects is its coat of cast-aluminum panels topping a 16-foot-high limestone base. Cast aluminum may look too gray and severe, particularly on sunless days, but it is not out of place in a city built on heavy metal.
And limestone, it must be remembered, is the sparkling material that clads such North Michigan Avenue landmarks as Tribune Tower, Fourth Presbyterian Church and the Drake Hotel. Kleihues thus is taking pains to have his museum fit its city and exploit its site.
The new MCA faces directly toward the Water Tower, symbol of risen Chicago. Kleihues is hopeful that the grand staircase will be a grand hangout, like the one at the Art Institute. (There will also be an entrance at ground level.)
The site, of course, is select: one block east of Michigan Avenue, two blocks from the lake, in a green belt bordered by the skyscraping cliffs of Chicago Avenue and Pearson Street. The museum occupies state-owned land that once was home to a National Guard armory, and will boast a luxurious sculpture garden with a footprint as big as its own: 184 by 184 feet.
All this is happening in a dense-pack neighborhood powered with sky towers and shopping crowds, sightseers, tourists, upper-crust apartments, hotels, offices, universities.
Kleihues has responded by fashioning big, enticing windows that open onto the scene. Boulevard, skyline and lake are part of the show at the new MCA, along with a 60-foot-tall light court that runs from front to back of the museum.
The sculpture garden, still being finished, lies just east of the building. Its loose-form terracing plays against the grid of the museum, but may cramp the space needed for displaying outsized pieces.
Be that as it may, the MCA is very much a part of a neighborhood. Unlike most of the other major museums here, it does not stand on city parkland (or benefit from Chicago Park District grants). Kleihues had to reshape the sculpture garden after neighbors protested that its wall would be too high and that the parking lot underneath the garden would attract too much traffic.
As redesigned, the wall steps down and most of it will be transparent cast-aluminum mesh, permitting passersby to look in. Parking was reduced from about 250 to 100 spaces, according to Director Kevin E. Consey.
The new MCA obviously is emerging as a civic and social center as well as an art center. Consey sees it as a place where people will want to go whether or not they’re interested in the exhibition of the moment.
That may not be show biz, but it is museum biz. Kleihues notes wryly that a sinuous first-floor stairway, one of his design prides, will lead into a second-floor museum shop.
The ultimate test for the museum, in any event, will be how well it displays art rather than itself. There are modern museums that overpower their contents, among them Mies’ National Gallery in Berlin and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum in New York.
That apparently will not be the case at Kleihues’ MCA. Its four upper galleries, at the third and fourth floors, are vaulted, with a range of ceiling heights under skylights mixing natural and artificial light. These spaces will hold the permanent collection in 21,500 square feet, and look promising in their present bone-and-sinew stage.
Two lower galleries, for temporary displays, will have artificial lighting. Their high ceilings could be a challenge for showings where a more intimate space might be desired.
The new MCA will have 39,000 square feet of galleries, and nearly as much for the garden. There also will be a theater, classrooms and a library– altogether about five times the space in the MCA’s present home at 237 E. Ontario St.
Most of the new building’s motor traffic will come and go on Chicago Avenue, but big rigs will have to exit onto Pearson Street, a sore point with some residents. There isn’t room for large trucks to turn around inside the museum’s parking structure.
The MCA has made big strides since its founding in 1967. The collection is swelling, Consey notes, and he worries that he won’t be able to show it all when the building debuts next June. Not a bad problem to have for a bright and crisp new museum.
A NEW USE FOR AN OLD MATERIAL
Most of the nearly 1,200 cast aluminum panels cladding the museum are 5 1/2 by 5 1/2 feet and weigh 250 pounds each.
All are 7/8 of an inch thick and are fastened to a steel truss with stainless steel screws whose glittering heads dot the walls. The panels are a new use, as a curtain wall, for an old material.
Each pebbly-surfaced piece was cast separately, and MCA director Kevin Consey made about 10 trips to a metals plant in El Paso, Tex., to check on the work.
First, a computerized tool die stamped the pattern into a sand form. Red-hot aluminum was then poured in, and blasted with steel shot after it hardened. The result is a tough, crystalline surface studded with small pyramids, very different from the smooth, thin sheet aluminum often used to clad buildings.
Five months after installation, the panels are weathering differently, as expected. They should darken and become more consistent in looks in about a year. The stuff in the air does it: the same mixture that works on the rusting steel Picasso sculpture at Daley Center in the Loop.
“Our concept was to use an industrial material in a metal-working city,” Consey says, a coating that would last long and need little or no maintenance.
He foresees a silvery patina on the MCA–in 50 or 60 years.
