The move is a major goal of the museum’s current president and director James Rondeau who, when he stepped into the job in 2016, began searching for an architect to take on revamping the entire site.
Together with the Art Institute, Barozzi Veiga will address the new museum as an interlocking complex–an unfolding series of immersive spaces to welcome the visitors.
Together with the Art Institute, Barozzi Veiga will address the new museum as an interlocking complex–an unfolding series of immersive spaces to welcome the visitors.
Rondeau said that, for now, firm principals Fabrizio Barozzi and Alberto Veiga are “partners to dream (up) the future” and that they’ll consider how the museum might look through the lenses of a five-year, 10-year, and 15-year, plan.
The project will transform the museum, by providing greater access to exhibitions, collections, and programs, with new and expanded art historical and social narratives. It will leverage the singular features of the Art Institute, incorporating new architectural revisions and additions. These changes will transform visitors’ experience, heightening the clarity of wayfinding and intensifying the enjoyment of the museum’s exceptional, manifold offerings.
The last time the museum was updated was in 2009, when Renzo Piano completed its modern wing in the northeast corner, which contributed 24,526 square meters to the campus of more than 9,000 square meters. Although the contemporary extension complemented the missing quadrant of the other three developed in Beaux-Arts style, it brought abundant dim daylight to the new spaces of the gallery and provided a "main street-like" room that links it to the building Existing, the structure is only part of a growing art museum that needs more attention.
