The Modern Wing
Renzo Piano Building Workshop (Renzo Piano born 1937) · Opened 2009
A long white building of limestone and glass faces Millennium Park under a roof that seems to float: a grid of white aluminium blades that Renzo Piano called the flying carpet. It shades the top floor galleries from direct sun while letting in a soft, even light from the north, so that the paintings upstairs are lit by the Chicago sky. The wing opened in 2009, added more than a quarter to the museum's size and gave the collections of twentieth and twenty first century art, architecture, design and photography a home of their own after decades in borrowed rooms.
Enter from Monroe Street and you are in Griffin Court, a tall skylit hall with a floating staircase, which runs the length of the building and works as a street through the museum. Look up at the glass roof and the steel columns, as thin as the structure allows, and at the way the limestone walls match the older building on Michigan Avenue. The third floor galleries hold European modern art, Picasso, Matisse, Brancusi, Giacometti and the Surrealists; the second floor has contemporary art and architecture and design. On the top level the Bluhm Family Terrace offers sculpture and a view over the park to the skyline.
Piano also designed the Nichols Bridgeway, a slender pedestrian bridge that rises from the lawn of Millennium Park and lands directly at the third floor of the wing, so that you can arrive from the park without touching the street. The building was the largest expansion in the museum's history and made it the second largest art museum in the United States. A memorable detail is the way the flying carpet is visible from the bridge and the park as a white plane hovering above the glass, so that the building announces itself as a lantern for art before you are inside.
Did You Know? The Nichols Bridgeway from Millennium Park delivers visitors straight to the third floor of the Modern Wing, and the walk gives one of the best skyline views in the city.
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