Milwaukee Art Museum
Interesting facts
- The pavilion's wings fold automatically whenever sensors register wind above 23 mph for more than three seconds.
- In 2004 the Quadracci Pavilion received the Outstanding Structure Award from the International Association for Bridge and Structural Engineering.
- The museum's roots go back to April 1888, when the meatpacker Frederick Layton opened his gallery with a $100,000 endowment.
- The institution took its present name, Milwaukee Art Museum, only in 1980, after more than two decades as the Milwaukee Art Center.
- The 1975 extension was built to house the collection of Peg Bradley, who gave more than 600 modern works and $1 million for construction.
- Its strong holdings of folk and self-taught art grew from gifts including the Michael and Julie Hall collection and the collection of playwright Lanford Wilson.
- The museum's art research library dates from 1916 and now occupies the Judge Jason Downer mansion, a house built in 1874.
- A $34 million expansion opened in 2015, adding a new lakefront entrance at the east end of the complex.
- Calatrava's winged pavilion appears on screen in the 2011 film Transformers: Dark of the Moon.
- Behind the pavilion, the Cudahy Gardens stretch about 600 feet along the lake, divided by ten-foot hedges around a fountain.
Why it is worth it
Milwaukee's lakefront has a building that moves. Every day, if the wind allows, the white sunscreen crowning the Quadracci Pavilion spreads and folds its two great wings above Lake Michigan — seventy-two steel fins, some over thirty metres long, rising to a span of about 66 metres, comparable to a jumbo jet. Designed by the Spanish architect-engineer Santiago Calatrava and completed in 2001, it was his first building in the United States and turned a regional museum into one of the most recognisable pieces of architecture in the Midwest.
The museum grew out of two institutions founded in 1888, the Layton Art Gallery and the Milwaukee Art Institute, which came together in 1957 inside Eero Saarinen's War Memorial Center, the modernist block that still anchors the complex. A Brutalist extension by David Kahler followed in 1975 to house a major gift of more than six hundred works. Calatrava's addition, set on the axis of Wisconsin Avenue and linked to downtown by the Reiman Bridge, a suspended footbridge hung from a tall angled mast, completed a campus that reads like a short history of twentieth-century architecture.
Inside the pavilion, Windhover Hall is the moment to stop: a vaulted reception hall about 27 metres high under a glass roof, its white ribs curving like the hull of a ship or the skeleton of a bird, with the lake filling the far windows. The wings — the Burke Brise Soleil — open when the museum opens, flap at noon and close at 10 p.m.; sensors fold them automatically when the wind gets up, and they are lit every evening after sundown.
The collection, close to 35,000 works, is worth the visit on its own. It is especially strong in Georgia O'Keeffe, in German Expressionism, in American painting of the Ashcan School and in Haitian art — an unusual mix that gives the galleries a character of their own.
Getting there
The museum stands on the lakefront at the eastern edge of downtown Milwaukee, about 0.8 km from the city centre; the Reiman Bridge leads straight in from the end of Wisconsin Avenue. General Mitchell International Airport (MKE) is about 10 km to the south.
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From the encyclopaedia
The Milwaukee Art Museum is an art museum in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Its collection of nearly 35,000 works of art and gallery spaces totaling 150,000 sq. ft. make it the largest art museum in the state of Wisconsin and one of the largest art museums in the United States.
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