This city 90 miles north of Chicago is best known for beer and bratwurst, but once an addition to its lakefront museum opens early in the new millennium, another “B” word — bird — may be what makes Milwaukee famous.
The most prominent feature of the project, designed by Spanish architect and engineer Santiago Calatrava, is a 200-foot-wide louvered sunshade that, when raised, will resemble a bird taking flight. That’s assuming, of course, that the grandiose contraption doesn’t turn out to be a mechanical failure.
Optimistic leaders of the Milwaukee Art Museum already are likening Calatrava’s design, now under construction on this city’s downtown shoreline, to such world-renowned landmarks as the Sydney Opera House and the St. Louis arch.
And they have another waterfront building on their minds — Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, the fantastic sculptural presence that, since it opened in 1997, has drawn hordes of tourists to a gritty riverfront site in the violence-prone Basque region of Spain.
Calatrava’s slogan, says one museum insider, is “Beat Bilbao.” It will be his first completed building in the United States and his first art museum.
Whatever the outcome of the adventurous undertaking, this much is certain: Milwaukee is the latest example of a trend that has roiled the normally placid field of architecture, especially in Chicago.
Instead of hiring local architects for plum jobs, many institutions are undertaking national, even worldwide, talent hunts — and signing up superstars who give their buildings instant cachet, though that is no guarantee of aesthetic success.
The phenomenon is particularly strong among museums, which can reap fundraising windfalls and send attendance soaring with signature designs.
In recent months, for example, the Art Institute of Chicago announced that the Italian architect Renzo Piano would design an expansion, while the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Mo., selected New York architect Steven Holl for its expansion and renovation.
Even the Davenport Museum of Art in Iowa has gotten into the act, naming six finalists, including New York superstar Richard Meier, who will vie to design its new building near the Mississippi River.
To be sure, it is hardly novel to see museums bringing in celebrated outsiders. The Art Institute’s original, neo-classical building, which opened in 1893, came off the drafting board of Boston’s Shepley, Rutan & Coolidge.
But in a world of jet travel, faxes, electronic mail and video conferencing, the museum market has gone global, just as other businesses have. Nowhere is that more apparent than in Milwaukee, where the museum in 1994 decided to conduct an international search for an architect. After all, said director Russell Bowman in an interview last week, “We don’t just collect local and American art.”
The guiding idea, he added: “Let’s simply look for the best solution.”
And look they did, with an eye toward getting a dramatic, modernist statement, one that would complement Eero Saarinen’s heavy, cross-shaped original structure from 1957. Part of the building serves as a war memorial.
Consultants drew up a list of 70 architects that included firms from Europe, Asia and the United States. (Because Calatrava had never built a museum, he was not among them, but he was added after Bowman read an article about him in an architectural magazine and thought he might be able to provide what the museum wanted.)
Eventually, three finalists were picked — two Japanese architects, Fumihiko Maki and Arata Isozaki, and Calatrava, who has won acclaim for bold yet lyrical bridges and train stations.
Surprisingly, given his star power, Gehry was not among the finalists. The reasons had less to do with talent than with the museum’s desire to set itself apart from other Midwestern institutions. Gehry, now designing a bandshell for Chicago’s Millennium Park, already had completed art museums in Minneapolis and Toledo. Milwaukee wanted to be different.
“I hate going to New York and being confused with Minneapolis,” Bowman said.
There is little danger of that. Calatrava’s design, which will add 125,000 square feet to the museum’s current total of 160,000, is nothing if not unique.
His design consists of three major elements: a low-slung exhibition pavilion with a curving roof that will extend southward from the Saarinen building; a pedestrian bridge with an angled mast and cables that will span a road that cuts off the museum from Milwaukee’s business district; and a towering reception hall enclosed by a curving, steeply pitched wall of glass.
That glass has inspired the buidling’s most flamboyant feature — the sunshade.
The flow of light into the hall, as well as heat levels, are supposed to be controlled by two symmetrical sets of louvers. Each is to be attached to a second angled mast that frames one side of the hall and functions like a spine for the fin-like blades. Made of thin but high-strength carbon fiber, the louvers are intended to block light in a way not unlike conventional window blinds.
Now on display at the museum, an architectural model shows how the system is supposed to work. It is, in a word, astonishing.
Press a button and the louvers, which rest on the roof of the reception hall when they are in the “down” position, rise slowly, spreading like the wings of a bird. In seconds, they are in the upright position, creating a spectacular sculptural form that engages in a potent dialogue with Saarinen’s original — one light, the other heavy; one static, the other dynamic. In reality, Bowman said, the movement of the louvers is expected to take four minutes.
Museum officials are confident that the unusual arrangement will work, in part because the louvers are being built by a company that constructs drawbridges and thus knows how to make things go up and down. If there is a heavy buildup of snow and ice or high winds whip off the lake, the louvers will remain closed, museum officials said.
The first test of the system, Bowman joked, may come on a Sunday morning at 2 a.m. — presumably when newspaper photographers and television cameramen are asleep.
Whatever the risks, the design has proved so appealing — and the English-speaking Calatrava has been so charming with potential donors — that the museum easily exceeded its fundraising expectations, according to Bowman. In fact, so much money was pledged from museum trustees, individuals and corporations that the budget went from $36 million to more than $50 million and new elements, like underground parking for visitors, were added to the project.
What began as a mere museum expansion became a much broader civic undertaking, a way to establish a new image for an old industrial city — and a way to draw tourists, including those from ever-so-close Chicago.
None of this would have happened without Milwaukee’s international search for an architect and his pathbreaking design.
We’ll know when the addition opens, in late 2000 or early 2001, whether going global has brought the city a masterpiece or a building that is more about novelty than quality.
“We wouldn’t have done this project at this level without the design,” Bowman said. “The design was the impetus for a more ambitious project, for good or for ill.”
