But Chicago is also a city full of surprises. In 1991 the museum’s trustees hired a devoutly modernist Berlin architect, Josef Paul Kleihues, now 63, to create an unrelentingly modernist building that could pass for the Deutschemotorvehikelbureau, circa 1932. It also turns out to be – at 151,000 square feet – the largest exhibition space for contemporary art in the country. The opening exhibition, ““Negotiating Rapture,’’ is chock-full of work by such darlings of transatlantic intellectuals as Joseph Beuys and Bruce Nauman. The MCA’s annual operating budget will now quadruple, to just over $11 million. But whether, in snow-swept January, Chicagoans will trudge in sufficient numbers from Michigan Avenue toward Lake Michigan to see installation art from New York and points east is a tossup. As Chicago art critic Alan Artner wrote, ““the Little Museum that Could’’ will have to keep ““from becoming the Big Museum that Can’t.''
If the building is any indication, bet on ““Could.’’ Yes, it’s austerely precise: every major dimension is an exact multiple of a 26-foot cube. It’s certainly cold (the exterior is clad in cast aluminum squares which will weather to a nice flat gray). And it’s pretty damned elitist-looking: set on a 16-foot-high platform, with the imposing front steps taken explicity from Karl Schinkel’s 1828 Altes Museum in Berlin. But inside, the MCA is welcoming, to both people and art. As soon as you’re in the door, you get a wonderful view straight through to the lake. The galleries are miraculously bright and open, with a computerized system that filters daylight and fluorescent light through frosted-glass barrel vaults. A couple of visits, and the MCA actually seems intimate.
Not that there wasn’t a battle to get it built. When the old armory on the site was slated for razing in 1987, nearby residents wanted a park and open space all the way to the water. The city favored more high-rise commercial development to rub elbows with the 74-story Water Tower Place next door. The new MCA, surrounded by greenery, is the compromise, and it has its critics. Architectural historian Franz Schulz, who’s written biographies of Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson, says the MCA lacks the ““elegance or classicism’’ of Mies (who immigrated to Chicago in 1938). But he admits that the interior is the building’s ““saving grace.’’ Since the museum’s next really big show (opening Nov. 16) is a survey of Chicago’s own postwar modern art, the odds are getting better for luring even the most dubious locals to the city’s best new building in years.
