The Art Institute announces plans for a major makeover of its sprawling campus — but the lions will stay on Michigan Avenue

Fabrizio Barozzi, left, and Alberto Veiga of the Barcelona architectural firm Barozzi/Veiga stand outside the Art Institute of Chicago on Sept 9, 2019. (Erin Hooley / Chicago Tribune)

The Art Institute of Chicago has hired a Barcelona architectural firm to craft a master plan that could bring profound transformation to the Michigan Avenue museum in coming years.

For its first North American commission, the prize-winning firm Barozzi/Veiga has been quietly studying the institution’s sprawling campus for the past two years and has begun formulating ideas aimed at making an inward-looking museum rooted in the 20th century more extroverted and modern via methods that could include adding new buildings, reconfiguring existing ones and rethinking the presentation of art within them.

“At some point we need to be understood as more of a porous social platform than an impervious temple to culture,” said museum Director James Rondeau.

On Tuesday, Rondeau pulled back the curtain to introduce to the full Art Institute board the architects he hopes will help lead the museum in that transition, firm principals Fabrizio Barozzi and Alberto Veiga. Their hiring was also announced to museum staff, whose buy-in will be similarly important if major changes are ultimately made.

The museum is moving forward cautiously, stressed Rondeau, who advocated for bringing in fresh eyes on the place when he took over as president and Eloise W. Martin director in 2016 and then, with the aid of key associates and a small board group, went out and found Barozzi/Veiga, winner of the 2015 European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture-Mies van der Rohe Award for its Szczecin Philharmonic Hall in Poland.

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“We’re really just at the point of saying that we’ve enlisted thought partners to dream the future,” said the director, whose museum has not seen major physical changes since Renzo Piano’s Modern Wing added 264,000 square feet in 2009. “It’s not a kind of megalomania for space. It is always about refining facilities, better visitor experience, better connectivity and access to collections that are not on view.”

The Szczecin Philharmonic Hall in Szczecin, Poland, by the architecture firm Barozzi/Veiga. (Getty Photo)

Rondeau said he saw as a “cautionary tale” the 2017 postponement of an announced major contemporary and modern wing revamp at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in the apparent absence of funds to complete the project.

But while the Chicago museum doesn’t want to similarly get out over the tips of its skis, it is “reasonable” to think that within 18 months, he said, “we would understand what Barozzi/Veiga would suggest looks like a five-year, 10-year, 15-year plan.”

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Rondeau and the architects said key factors guiding their thinking include working to open the museum to the city on its western, Michigan Avenue side, to Grant Park and the lake on its eastern side and even to the train lines that bisect what is, at about 1 million square feet, the nation’s second largest art museum, behind the Met.

“Enlisting them as partners in trying to imagine what we might look like in the future has been the best decision I've made on the job,” said the executive, whose background is as a modern and contemporary art curator.

Brenda Shapiro was a member of the five-person board formed in 2016 that helped vet, and then approved, Rondeau’s recommendation of the architects. She’s pleased Barozzi/Veiga is thinking big in this early phase.

“It’s very, very easy to limit one’s ideas and one’s choices by being worried about being fiscally responsible, by being prudent, by not over-reaching or over-dreaming,” she said. “But at an initial stage, I believe this about architecture: You don’t want to put yourself into a box where you never get out."

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And when a museum is not willing to change things, she added: “The dust is not only on the objects themselves, but intellectually it hangs there.”

For Barrozzi and Veiga, the assignment is a deep honor and an extreme challenge, the two Europeans said in joint interviews in recent days. Seven buildings have been added since 1893 to the original beaux-arts museum edifice on Michigan Avenue, and there are restrictions against building on any of the four perimeters or taller than the current buildings.

The Art Institute’s landmark main entrances, the iconic steps and the lions on Michigan Avenue, are “not going to change,” Veiga said. Neither will the Modern Wing doors on Monroe Street.

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Nonetheless, the chance to reshape such a world-renowned museum “is the dream of every architect,” said Barozzi, 42, an Italian native, who founded the firm with Veiga in 2004. “Sentimental monumentality” is a credo of theirs, they proclaim on their website, “architecture that strikes a balance between the specificity of the place and autonomy of form.”

“Really, this is the kind of project that happens once in your life,” added Veiga, 46, a Spaniard. “There is just one AIC in the world. If this, step by step, becomes real, it’s going to be a dream.”

While the architects are keenly aware that proposing a plan and getting that plan built are two separate things, they say they feel emboldened by Rondeau’s open-ended charge to them.

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“We asked this firm to join us without a brief,” Rondeau said. “When (previous director) Jim Wood hired Renzo Piano, it was, ‘Please build a building for modern and contemporary — there.’ It was a very concrete briefing. And we’ve said, ‘Could you please come and help us think about Chicago? And we actually don’t know what we’re doing, if anything.'”

The campus of the Art Institute of Chicago as seen from the Cliff Dwellers Club across Michigan Avenue. (Erin Hooley / Chicago Tribune)

Seen from above, the Art Institute looks like mismatched construction kits forced together, two discrete hodgepodge structures connected by one skinny building spanning some half-dozen train tracks and a roadway that is a bus shortcut from downtown to the McCormick Place convention center. Even experienced visitors can find navigation within the buildings vexing, and viewed from a Monroe Street bridge overlooking the tracks, the complex suggests warehouse more than art house.

Still, the museum, with its world-class collections especially rich in impressionist and post-impressionist painting, is one of Chicago’s top tourist draws, pulling in 1.62 million visitors in 2018 and regularly landing among TripAdvisor’s top five U.S. museums.

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“We want to give coherence to the whole campus,” said Barozzi, standing just outside the Modern Wing on a deck overlooking the South Shore Line tracks.

Piano’s Modern Wing is closer to the idea of what the museum wants to become, Rondeau said, a structure with windows facing and an elegant bridge into Millennium Park. It boasts relatively inviting glass doors and a big central hall with the potential, at least, to serve as a kind of public square.

“The Piano building's a great example of how a greater degree of transparency can bring a greater recognition of site and the specificity of site and a greater feeling of connection to the city,” said Rondeau.

Piano also added, Rondeau noted, the three big windows overlooking the trains cut into what the museum labels “The Bridge,” the pass-through building that essentially takes you from the old Art Institute to the new on the first floor through a gantlet mostly of Indian and Southeast Asian sculpture. On the second floor it houses many of the museum’s superstars, works by the likes of Caillebotte, Seurat, Monet and Van Gogh.

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To the extent that Barozzi and Veiga are ready to talk specifics, this building, originally called Gunsaulus Hall, is one of their focuses. They see it becoming a new “center of gravity” for the museum, in Veiga’s words, a “new public centrality,” in Barozzi’s.

Working on that building over the tracks would allow them “to establish a new relationship with this industrial atmosphere that could be very powerful and could intensify the specificity of this museum,” Barozzi said.

And thinking about "The Bridge” building, they said, has started a flow of ideas for “a logical re-arrangement of the collection,” Barozzi said.

They’re not ready to detail that re-arrangement yet, but they are taking on one of the museum’s most daunting challenges, helping visitors simply get around. “One of the big things of this proposal is to clarify the way-finding, the access to the galleries, the access to the different programs, et cetera, in a logical and very clear way,” said Veiga.

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The other AIC building they have immediately identified as a focal point for transformation is the 1958 Ferguson Building, a slender wing that houses executive offices and looks the part. It abuts the original building parallel to Michigan Avenue, overlooking a lovely park on the campus’ northwest corner that is currently hidden from the avenue by a dense row of shrubbery.

“It is the worst building in the most beautiful and public location,” said Barozzi, and the architects described almost being shocked to see such a space being so closed off and ill-used.

“We deeply believe that building is to be a building where the public can circulate, where the public can see art,” Veiga said.

Among the other notions they mentioned: That people in Grant Park should be able to look west and immediately know the big complex they see is the Art Institute; that they originally didn’t see much room on the campus to think about new buildings, but that has changed with familiarity; and that more building over the tracks is not likely.

A train sits outside the Art Institute of Chicago on Sept. 9, 2019. (Erin Hooley / Chicago Tribune)

Engaging the architects was fueled by 2018’s largest-ever cash donation made to the museum, $50 million from trustee Janet and husband Craig Duchossois and $20 million from board Chair Robert Levy and wife Diane v.S. Levy, Rondeau said.

That’s a big head start, but obviously new funds would have to be raised to execute any major Barozzi/Veiga concepts. The Modern Wing, for instance, cost $283 million.

For the hiring process, Rondeau, working with Deputy Director Ann Goldstein and Shapiro’s board group, specifically identified three types of firms as finalists, he said: a Chicago company; a major international architecture star; and up-and-comers.

Choosing the architects on the rise, he considers both “courageous” but also, after studying Barozzi/Veiga’s work, almost inevitable.

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He saw the concert hall in Poland, an elegant white structure whose exterior can look like a series or sails cutting through a city block or like cathedral spires rooted to it. They saw a soon-to-open fine-arts museum in Lausanne, Switzerland (Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts) that borders railways and incorporates an old train station.

And, Rondeau said, “they did a beautiful extension to the museum in Chur in Switzerland. It’s just a kind of beautiful little box attached to a neoclassical, beaux-arts structure. And it’s so respectful in its proportions and materials, but it also is just insanely beautiful. ... It did exactly what someday we will need to do here, which is to balance something new with something old and to respect that neoclassical identity.”

Said Shapiro: “These are architects who are, it looks like, in their period of maximal creativity balanced by maximal flexibility. If you can catch architects in that kind of golden period, you’re very lucky.”

When the first museum building went up, the founders had etched in the frieze around its top edges the names of great artists through the ages — all men, but that’s another story.

“That was 100 percent aspiration,” Rondeau said. “That building was a hope chest. We didn’t have anything. We had plaster casts. And so carving that frieze was such a kind of bold move for this cow town in 1893 to say ‘Durer, Rembrandt, Michelangelo, Leonardo, this is who we want to become.’ And, by and large, we became that and more.

“That’s exactly the moment we’re in, and we need to figure out what is the equivalent of that entablature for the second half of the 21st century.”