On the event of its 50th anniversary, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago has received a redesign by LA-based architects Johnston Marklee – a careful interior sculpting and shifting, respectful of the original Josef Paul Kleihues designed building completed in 1996. While lines are continuous and additions seamless, Johnston Marklee’s design makes a quietly dramatic update that reflects the developing role of the museum into a social, educational and civic space.
Reviewed in the New York Times the original MCA was described by critic Herbert Muschamp as a building that ‘put art back in the box’ – he celebrated how it confined art into a single focused activity, without distraction. Yet, half a century later, Madeleine Grynsztejn, Pritzker Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, no longer sees the museum as just a ‘treasure box’, but also a ‘tool box’, where audiences visit to connect to other people, as well as look at art.
‘Madeleine envisioned the MCA as an arts activated space, it wasn’t just galleries showing works in the most traditional sense,’ says architect Sharon Johnston, who worked closely with Grynsztejn, along with architect Mark Lee on the redesign. Within the boundaries of Kleihues’s grid based rationalism, they worked to ‘excavate the plan of the building – not to create something new, but to work within the grid to give it more fluidity and range,’ she says.
