Hitting the right notes

Chicago, Barack Obama's hometown, is the American city that is most aware of its architecture - from the steel-framed buildings of Louis Sullivan to Frank Lloyd Wright's prairie style, from the 442-metre Sears Tower, the tallest building in the US, to Frank Gehry's whimsically grand band shell in Millennium Park. Now, the Italian architect Renzo Piano has joined that distinguished club, with a new building for the city's august Art Institute of Chicago.

Chicago is a city with deep corporate pockets - the family of the museum's board chairman, Tom Pritzker of Hyatt Hotels, endows the Pritzker Prize, the top annual distinction in architecture, which Piano won in 1998. Yet the city's music is the blues, its speech is plain, and its humour is shamelessly self-deprecating. On a tour of the skyscraper-lined Chicago River, an earlier version of Dubai in its height and density, a local guide hit a positive note: "Our river water has just been upgraded from toxic to polluted."

In the city that invented steel-frame construction, Piano's crystalline blend of glass and steel has refined rather than reinvented his own architectural language. The $293 million (Dh1,1bn) Modern Wing - really a separate ensemble of structures - is an assured example of Piano's elegance, on which a growing number of US museums have come to rely. The conventional wisdom on Piano is that he was the safe choice for a museum not known for its adventurousness. Yet the Art Institute is counting on the 71-year-old architect to redirect it toward the future.

Part of that strategy is transparency. The building's huge windows face Millennium Park, a gathering point in downtown Chicago since 2000. Natural light fills its 100-metre atrium and shines into its galleries, thanks to a separate rooftop that Piano calls a "magic carpet", made to channel illumination. While visitors routinely get lost in the Art Institute's old buildings, circulation in the new structures is clear and logical - so logical that the interior seems a utopian version of an architect's model.

And the art looks good. Although the new structure is called the Modern Art Wing, Chicago has been collecting modern art since the late 19th century. Modern art here begins with early Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Fernand Leger and Francis Picabia, and marches through every art movement to new media in a video of the British musician Tricky by Steve McQueen, who represents the United Kingdom in next month's Venice Biennale.

Abundant natural light, a Piano signature, varies by gallery and by the medium of work exhibited. Two dark sections midway through the path of the museum's story of 20th-century art are reserved for surrealism, which had a particular attraction to Chicagoans. A wall devoted to boxes by Joseph Cornell was a small museum in itself. On the ground floor, in the smallish special exhibition galleries, the museum has organised a tribute to the American painter Cy Twombly. On view were some of Twombly's little-known sculptures in a painted art povera style. More dramatic were his hypnotically throbbing flower pictures in red and orange - a revelation, since even Twombly downplays his talents as a colourist.

Just as surprising was a series of large paintings inspired by Arab culture: III Notes from Salalah, on which Twombly covers canvases in dark green vinyl paint and then swirled calligraphic patterns in white that look like Arabic writing. Earlier paintings by Twombly, who works in Rome and Virginia, have included writing and script-like scrawls and scratchings. Here, while his strokes simulate actual writing, the white gestures are also evocations of Dhofar's exceptionally lush landscape, and suggest the shape of waves and rain. From a museum in the American heartland (designed by an Italian) the gestures from Twombly, like Piano's opening to the light and the streets, signal a kinship and universal culture of a medium that transcends written language.

The Art Institute is also profiting from space to show more works of art in the rest of the museum. Renovations of other galleries in the museum helped raise the total makeover's cost to more than $400 million (Dh1.47bn). Piano himself designed renovated galleries for the Art Institute's abundant collections of South Asian pieces. The result is a vast sculpture hall without walls, something of a trial project before the Modern Wing opened.

New lighting makes the museum's late-19th-century paintings look better than ever. The standouts here, no surprise, are Gustave Caillebotte's Paris Street, Rainy Day (1877) and the extraordinary A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte - 1884 (1884-86) by Georges Seurat. The Seurat scene of ordinary Parisians at leisure has been loaned only once since the museum acquired it in 1926 and it no longer leaves the building. The masterpiece is reason alone for a visit to Chicago.

There is no comparable "destination" work of art in the Modern Wing, except for Piano's building, the Art Institute hopes. Henri Matisse's sombre Bathers by a River (1909-16) while a ground-breaking work of experimental abstraction for the artist - and so huge that Chicago came by the painting after prominent collectors turned it down - is less of a crowd-pleaser. Ten years ago, when Piano's museum project was first conceived (in a more modest version than that which now stands), neither Piano nor anyone at the Art Institute could have imagined that the Chicago native Barack Obama, then an Illinois State Senator, would be in the White House when the building opened.

For Piano, it is a hopeful coincidence. In an interview in the Modern Wing's airy education rooms, the architect notes that he has been at the right place at the right time before. His Centre Pompidou (which he designed with Richard Rogers) opened in Paris in 1977, when a pivotal popularisation of museum architecture was underway. Piano added that he received a commission to rebuild's Berlin's Potsdamer Platz in 1991, two years after the Berlin Wall fell. "I've been lucky," he says. "We won competitions, but we were lucky.

"We opened this building a few months after Barack Obama was elected, and in some way this building talks to the city. This building is about accessibility, this building is about transparency, it is about belonging to the city, it is about destroying every possible barrier between the street, the park and the building. "The first building was a palace; this building is not about intimidation - it's about curiosity, it's about pleasure, it's about enjoyment," Piano says, referring to the museum's original 1893 building, part of an international exposition near the lakefront. "One-hundred -and-thirty years later, we have to express the same civic pride, but not by using the same language. The language we are using today is the language of accessibility, clarity, simplicity, openness, porosity. Dignity is achieved not by making a marble and stone palace. Dignity is achieved by actually going to the root of the city that actually invented modernity, in steel."

Piano recalls his days as an architecture student, when he learnt that the steel frame, developed after fire consumed much of Chicago in the 1870s, enabled builders to build higher and lighter structures. "For me it was the living proof of lightness, not massiveness," he says. "In this building we wanted to express intimacy, but at the same time monumentality - when you make a public building, you have to be strong. Timidity is stupid in this case," Piano adds. "You have to accept the responsibility for making something… I'll use the word monumental, for provocation."

Although Barack Obama did not travel to Chicago for the building's opening (and Michelle Obama was in New York on Monday to cut a ribbon at the unveiling of the renovated American Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art), the strong Obama connection to the Art Institute has spun its own mythological web. The presidential couple had their first date at the Art Institute, although staff there can't say which works of art the two viewed. The museum's new restaurant, Terzo Piano ("third floor" in Italian, as well as a play on the architect's name) is now run by the Obamas' favourite chef, Tony Mantuano, who also cooks at Spiggia, where the couple celebrated their first dinner out after the election. And Chicago's new wave of foreign tourism, evident all along Michigan Avenue, coincides with the Obama election and presidency, locals say.

For all its rationality, the new building still has its quirks. Train tracks bisect the new and old sections of the museum. In a courtyard decorated with a diamond-shaped work by Ellsworth Kelly, narrow columns ascend the height of three floors, evoking high-flying architectural forms from the Kennedy days of the early 1960s. Are they now in harmony with the soaring hopes of the Obama era? On the building's other side, from the top of its western structure, a narrow white bridge, its curved underside inspired by the hull of a boat, extends some 200 metres, diagonally across the new museum's rectilinear axis, above the street and into Millennium Park. The bridge leads through a garden of colossal contemporary sculptures toward the park's centrepiece, the previously mentioned band shell, designed by Frank Gehry - himself a builder of boat shapes - who adorned the open stage with titanium sheets curved like the petals of a huge flower.

The mix of Piano and Gehry, and of a massive reflective cloud by Anish Kapoor and fountains by Jaume Plensa, lined on two sides by the city's distinctive skyscrapers, revives the notion of a cultural district launched in 1893. Can it jump-start the city as an Obama-era cultural destination that reaches critical mass with the Modern Wing? Chicagoans could be the biggest sceptics. Just before the Modern Wing opened, the Art Institute announced an admission increase from $12 (Dh44) to $18 (Dh66) - modest, but enough to sour citizens and politicians on the museum's populist rhetoric. A compromise reduced the fee to $16 (Dh58) for Chicago residents, but bad blood still flows. A week of free entry for all could heal wounds and even the tight-fisted will still come to view Piano's elegant exterior, just as they would a sculpture in Millennium Park. Once there, it will be hard to keep them away.