#190: WINGS OF DESIRE | QUADRACCI PAVILION

What makes this museum addition an instant icon for the city of Milwaukee? Yes, there is the striking look of the building and its lakefront setting. But also, this structure, through no small feat of engineering, actually moves—its wing-like roof opening and closing daily.

For this $130 million addition to the Milwaukee Art Museum, known as the Quadracci Pavilion, the trustees created a long list of 70 architects to consider for the job. After several rounds, Spanish architect/engineer/sculptor, Santiago Calatrava, won the commission. The name “Pavilion” is deceptively modest, as if this addition was to be a quaint cottage. Quite the opposite, Calatrava’s vision is heroic and ambitious, a museum like no other of its time.

Completed in 2001 and Calatrava’s first work in America, the 142,000-square-foot building contains exhibition space, retail, café, underground parking, and the glass-roofed, 90-foot tall atrium. With the proportions and verticality of this light-filled reception area, it is a near-scared space. Symbolically speaking, Calatrava created a cathedral to the arts.

Kinetic architecture is uncommon. Finding a building that moves and transforms is not only rare, but requires complex engineering. With the Quadracci Pavilion, I am not referring to how the common garage door opens and closes. Calatrava’s enormous brise-soleils envelope the glass atrium, opening and closing remarkably. 72 steel fins per side, the building spreads to a wingspan of 220 feet when open.

The iconic nature of the Quadracci arrives through an architecture instantly identifiable—unique, recognizable and memorable. Its other-worldly personality remains in one’s psyche long after a single visit. Though this building shares a design vocabulary with other projects by the architect—in Spain, Belgium, France and New York—the muscular, expressive, even Baroque work for Milwaukee is singularly creative.

Similar to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Quadracci contributes to the “Bilbao Effect,” a spectacular occurrence where a community is invigorated and transformed, including economic growth, through the arrival of wow-factor “starchitecture.” This “Effect” was coined after the 1997 completion of Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain. Over a million people visit this single building annually, supporting the museum director’s agenda of “a transformational project” that would be an “agent of economic development” for the Basque region.

Not just a modern day cathedral for art, the Quadracci itself is art, no mere neutral vessel for the display of creative artifacts. In fact, very little art is displayed inside. The art is the architectural form itself, the unusual visual character jarringly contrasting the surroundings of a historical American city. The art to visit here comprises the light, space, and proportions of the design, and of course the wings in motion—not just old paintings hanging on a blank walls.

Calatrava suggests, “I hope that…we have designed not a building, but a piece of the city.”