It used to be that you had to look pretty carefully at the buildings in the 600 block of South Michigan Avenue if you wanted to find the Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies, housed in a nondescript little office building next to a vacant lot.
Officials of the 82-year-old institution expect to be noticed a lot more now that they have moved into an eye-popping new glass-fronted, 10-story headquarters at 610 S. Michigan Ave., site of the former vacant lot.
In the old building, even if hundreds of people were visiting, few of them would know it because of the office-type design, Spertus President Howard A. Sulkin said Tuesday at a press preview.
“We kept hearing people say, ‘Oh, the Spertus, what a marvelous facility. Too bad nobody goes there,'” he said. “Now we have a facility that will let people know what is going on in here.”
The airy new building, which opens to the public Nov. 30, serves as the main educational and cultural center for the Chicago region’s 285,000 Jewish residents but is designed to welcome people of all faiths, Sulkin said.
The structure was built expressly to accommodate the institute’s main functions, including a museum that displays both fine art and objects from its world-class collection of Jewish-related artifacts. It provides an expanded, state-of-the-art Asher Library, one of North America’s largest Jewish libraries with 120,000 volumes, 250,000 periodicals, films, videocassettes, DVDs and documents. A climate-controlled room will house 4,000 rare books and maps.
It also houses the school around which the institute was founded in 1924, then known as the College of Jewish Studies. The school has grown into the largest graduate program in Jewish studies in the world with 250 students in four master’s degree programs and 45 students in two doctoral programs.
The new building has advanced technology for distance learning, allowing students to pursue degrees from home, but also gives the school 30 percent more classroom space, allowing the faculty to add new programming.
The all-glass front of the structure entices passers-by with a colorful lobby gift shop at ground level and a Wolfgang Puck kosher cafe on the second story.
“The idea is to bring people into the building and then up to the top floor” where the main museum galleries are located in stunning spaces overlooking Grant Park, said Ronald Krueck, partner in Krueck + Sexton Architects, the Chicago firm that designed the new building both inside and out.
Spertus is less interested in becoming a much larger institution than in using its new space to create exhibits not seen elsewhere, said museum director Rhoda Rosen.
“We’re trying to do things that not only help us to celebrate the Jewish experience but to test and explore the limits of the Jewish experience where it meets the broader culture. I like to think of our museum projects being modest but smart,” said Rosen.
Sixteen-foot ceilings in the gallery spaces, an increase from the 12-foot limits of the old building, will allow curatorial staff to display larger objects.
On the ninth floor, Spertus has created a horseshoe-shaped, floor-to-ceiling glassed-in gallery containing about 1,000 objects in its permanent collection of 15,000 artifacts from the ancient Near East, Europe and Chicago, covering a span of 3,000 years.
Called the “depot,” the curved glass case serves both as a public display and as a safe storage repository, said Rosen. “It features fine art, ceremonial objects and simple, day-to-day material culture from the past, a testimony to Jewish lives lived,” she said.
The 10th-floor exhibit area is reserved for temporary shows that will change every three to four months, starting with “The New Authentics: Artists of the Post-Jewish Generation.” The exhibit features 16 U.S. artists born between 1960 and 1980, some of them religiously devout and some atheist, but all exploring how their Jewish roots inform their artistic vision.
The institute will charge an admission fee of $7 for adults and $5 for students and seniors.
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wmullen@tribune.com
