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Photograph: Cables, strung from a mast that acts as a counterbalance to the pedestrian bridge, are a lyrical contrast to the closed brise-soleil.
Unlike Las Vegas high rollers, art museum directors don't walk around with suitcases full of cash and dice spilling on green felt crap tables. But maybe they should, considering the gambler's mentality it takes to build a great museum today. Anyone wanting to repeat the much-hyped ``Bilbao effect'' must forge a partnership with an architectural superstar, raise millions of dollars, then hope that the finished product turns out to be a media megastory that draws critical raves as well as hordes of visitors.
For better or for worse, this is the way the global museum game is played at the beginning of the 21st century, and it certainly describes the high-wire act that the Milwaukee Art Museum has performed with its $75 million Quadracci Pavilion addition designed by Zurich-based, Spanish-born architect and engineer Santiago Calatrava, with Milwaukee firm Kahler Slater as architect of record. Not only is this Calatrava's first building in the United States and his first museum, but it also represents his most extensive essay in kinetic architecture, sporting a 217-foot-wide brise-soleil, set atop the museum's glass-sheathed reception area, that opens like the wings of a giant bird.
Before the museum opened last October, questions abounded about the feasibility and appropriateness of the daring contraption. A tropical sunshade in frigid Milwaukee? There were concerns, too, about Calatrava: How could he relate his stark white, gravity-defying, steel-and-concrete Modernism to the Midwestern Rust Belt city of Milwaukee?
Today, though, it is clear that Milwaukee's gamble has paid off in the form of a striking monument that is at once a strong personal statement and a sensitive essay in the making of place. While visitors may flock to the addition to glimpse the birdlike brise-soleil, they are likely to come away realizing that the device is not an isolated gimmick, but simply the most visible part of an inspired, carefully conceived whole. What makes the building fly is Calatrava's singular fusion of sculpture and structure.
Structure has been off the architectural radar screen for nearly a quarter of a century, ever since the Postmodern assault on the formulaic Modernist buildings of...