Flying carpet...

The opening of a new wing, designed by Renzo Piano, at the cramped Art Institute of Chicago offers new lessons in design, writes James S Russell

Architect Renzo Piano’s new $294 million Modern Wing for the cramped Art Institute of Chicago provides much-needed additional space and a flying carpet.

The carpet — Piano’s term — hovers over the 264,000-square-foot stone-and-glass Modern Wing as a great horizontal plane. It’s an elaborately wrought grillwork that doses top-lit galleries with highly controlled daylight. The new wing, comes with an ill-timed bump in the admission price to $18 from $12 starting May 23. Piano’s addition reflects the newly genteel Chicago as remade by Mayor Richard M Daley. His Honour has transformed a city known for murderous public-housing high-rises and vast derelict factories with a tower-bedecked skyline and enough streetside tulips to empty Holland.

While the Modern Wing brings an elegant aloofness to the cityscape, it also points to the infatuation of risk-averse trustees with the

high-minded sensibility Piano first expressed in the 1986 Menil Collection in Houston. Finding it again and again, in the Menil’s Cy Twombly Gallery, Atlanta’s High Museum, Dallas’s Nasher Sculpture Center and the Broad wing of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, amounts to an unwelcome aesthetic tyranny.

Beyond the original entrance to the stone Art Institute, where bronze lions have been roaring at Michigan Avenue traffic since 1893, various wings flank a long, grand-staired hallway that culminates in the outdoor McKinlock Court. Piano wrenches this procession sideways at the court and sends it northward along a tall daylight-bathed passageway of ecclesiastical purity. Called the Griffin Court, it leads to the 2004 Millennium Park — a crowd-pleasing cacophony of architecture (a band shell of exploding metal ribbons by Frank Gehry), monumental artworks (by Anish Kapoor and Jaume Plensa), and artsy gardens.

Piano joins the fun with a 620-foot pedestrian bridge. It offers great views of the city and Lake Michigan. The wing itself, which increases the museum’s space by a third, presides over this scene with impeccably proportioned layers of glass, metal supports and thick limestone piers, yet it leaves an indistinct impression.

North-facing galleries let in more daylight through windows swaddled in two layers of glass and two separate shade systems. The visitor is allowed ghostly views of the park and the city. Piano has perfected his way with daylight over the years, certainly an important achievement, and yet the very homogeneity of the light he produces takes the sanitizing tendency of museums to an extreme. Exquisiteness becomes the value to be cherished above all others, threatening to smother art where beauty is not the primary objective.n