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Terms and conditions apply. * Savings buckets are a feature of Ally Bank's Savings Account. * No ATM fees from Ally Bank at Allpoint and Moneypass ATMs plus we reimburse for fees charged by other ATM owners nationwide up to $10 per statement cycle. * Early direct deposit offers eligible direct deposits up to two days sooner. * Spending buckets are a feature of Ally Bank's Spending Account. by [Richard Lacayo](https://time.com/author/richard-lacayo/) May 18, 2009 4:00 AM UTC  The façade of the new addition to the Art Institute of Chicago, designed by Renzo Piano The façade of the new addition to the Art Institute of Chicago, designed by Renzo PianoJames Iska by [Richard Lacayo](https://time.com/author/richard-lacayo/) May 18, 2009 4:00 AM UTC In a gallery at the Art Institute of Chicago, there’s a painting from 1913 by the German Expressionist Franz Marc called _The Bewitched Mill_. A waterfall spills down the center of the canvas between a scene of machines and houses on one side and trees and animals on the other. It’s a fantasy of magical reconciliation between the natural and man-made worlds — always a nice trick if you can do it. Somebody who can do it and then some is Renzo Piano, the Italian architect whose refined new addition to the Art Institute opened over the weekend to large crowds and a big outdoor party. The $294 million Modern Wing, built to house the Institute’s great collection of 20th and 21st century work, is a complicated exercise in reconciliation. A resolutely modern building, it not only manages to gently introduce itself into the greenery of Chicago’s Millennium Park but also draws in three tricky neighbors — the original Art Institute, the active commuter railway lines that run between them, and the city of Chicago, where around any corner there’s another architectural masterpiece asking just what you’re doing here. To which Piano’s building has an easy answer: “Making myself at home.” ([See pictures of Renzo Piano’s major projects.](http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1847105,00.html)) Piano is exaggerating only a bit when he says that “Chicago invented modern architecture, invented modernity after the fire.” The Great Fire of 1871 wiped away large stretches of the city and opened them for rebirth in a modern industrial and high-rise idiom. There was nothing particularly modern about the original Art Institute, a Beaux Arts culture palace from 1893\. But it symbolized the determination of the city’s élite to rebuild Chicago as a cultural force to be reckoned with. Over the years it was expanded frequently. Now the 264,000-sq.-ft. addition of the Modern Wing, which was proposed by the Institute’s former director James Wood and seen to completion by his successor James Cuno, makes the Art Institute the second largest American museum, after the Metropolitan Museum in New York. ([See pictures of the new Modern Wing.](http://lookingaround.blogs.time.com/2009/05/19/piano-in-chicago-in-pictures/)) Over the past decade or so, Piano has become one of the most sought-after architects in the U.S., especially for museum commissions. In Houston, Atlanta, New York City, San Francisco and Fort Worth, Texas, museum trustees have gone to Piano for buildings that are serene, lucid and elegantly detailed. His designs may not push the envelope, but they seal it with a kiss. His best buildings have a delicacy inseparable from their tensile power. As Piano likes to say, “Beauty is not romantic. Beauty is very strong.” Put in those terms, it would be fair to say that the Modern Wing is one of his strongest American projects ever, his best since the superb little Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas. Like a lot of architects, Piano grimaces when people ask him about his style. “I hate the idea,” he says. “It’s a dangerous thing, a rubber stamp you put on the world.” What he believes in, he says, “is the value of transparency and light. This is not a style. This is just an attitude.” So Piano’s buildings are filled with light — a delicate issue for museums, which have to protect paintings from direct sun but crave the atmosphere that only natural daylight can provide. In the mid-1980s he developed an ingenious louvered roof to filter powdery sunlight into the Menil Collection in Houston. Ever since, every museum that’s hired him has been looking for its own version of the Piano roof. [See 10 things to do in Chicago.](http://www.time.com/time/travel/cityguide/article/0,31489,1846254,00.html) [Read about Renzo Piano’s design for the California Academy of Sciences.](http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1846715,00.html) The one that shelters the Modern Wing starts with a broad flat canopy of aluminum blades. Those are angled to obstruct southern light while admitting gentler northern light, then deliver it to the third-floor galleries through translucent fabric screens. From outside, it also tops off the building’s silhouette with a final flourish: a thin wafer of aluminum afloat on slender steel trusses. Piano likes to call it the “flying carpet,” and you can see why. Piano has placed floor-to-ceiling glass walls at the north and south ends of his building, which introduce light directly into some of the galleries through a scrim that can be raised on overcast days. The window walls also admit some powerful views of Millennium Park, including a huge vista of the billowing steel panels of Frank Gehry’s wonderful Pritzker band shell, which comes at you like a breaker on the beach at Santa Monica. You can get to the Modern Wing from Millennium Park by way of a slender pedestrian bridge that rises to deposit visitors onto a rooftop sculpture terrace that’s free of charge. But to be admitted to the galleries, which on most days have an admission fee, you enter at ground level. What you find there is a three-story, glass-roofed atrium, a long processional space that’s flanked on the left by a freestanding stairway that zigzags up to galleries on the second and third floors. On the right, temporary exhibition galleries occupy the first floor, with design and architecture above them, and on the third floor, a restaurant and that sculpture terrace. The dimensions of this atrium are pretty compelling. The long aisle just about siphons you into the museum. But the high expanses of bare white wall, a Modernist fetish, are a little bland. You wonder what might have been done in this space by Herzog and de Meuron, the designers of the Olympic Stadium in Beijing, who don’t mind jolting their surfaces a bit. But contorted form and elaborate surfaces dropped out of Piano’s vocabulary long ago, within just a few years of his and Richard Rogers’ completion of the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris in 1977\. His allegiance is to the working principles of classic Modernism, and in this case with a nod to Chicago Modernism, which he references everywhere. By its horizontal thrust the Modern Wing harks back to the Prairie-style architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright. Its three adjacent bays of glass wall at the end of each floor bear trace elements of the tripartite “Chicago window” that was one of the city’s early contributions to skyscraper style. And the whole place speaks the language of Mies van der Rohe, the German Modernist who fled to Chicago in the 1930s and filled the city with his resolute exercises in glass and steel. It goes without saying that Gehry’s pinwheeling band shell in Millennium Park couldn’t be more unlike Piano’s firm Cartesian box. Seeing them across from each other makes you think of those neighborhoods in Rome where the Baroque rubs shoulders with the classical, but with the difference that the Gehry and the Piano were built just a few years apart. Now they face each other as signs of the immense range of architectural practice these days — and of the fact that there’s more than one road to the peak. [See pictures of Chicago.](http://www.time.com/time/travel/cityguide/article/0,31489,1846254%5F1861668,00.html) [See TIME’s Pictures of the Week.](http://www.time.com/time/picturesoftheweek) Chicago's Art Institute Expands, with Elegance ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/archive/6909991/chicagos-art-institute-expands-with-elegance/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/archive/6909991/chicagos-art-institute-expands-with-elegance/"},"headline":"Chicago's Art Institute Expands, with Elegance","datePublished":"2009-05-18T04:00:00.000Z","dateModified":"2026-03-22T15:57:15.055Z","description":"In a gallery at the Art Institute of Chicago, there's a painting from 1913 by the German Expressionist Franz Marc called The Bewitched Mill. 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