Is Chicago's Art Institute showing signs of 'star-chitecture'?

"Chicago’s cultural power has been fuelled not by the genius of its own artists but by the wealth of local industrial magnates eager to garland their city. Tom Pritzker is typical of them: the chairman of the Hyatt Hotel chain and the Marmon Group conglomerate and much else, he’s a lifelong Chicagoan. He heads the institute’s board and he funded Gehry’s pavilion. He’s also aware of the prestige that Chicago once had as a beacon for modern architecture. It was here that steel-frame construction was first perfected in the 1880s, making way for the first skyscrapers, and great names have put down influential buildings in the area, from Louis Sullivan to Frank Lloyd Wright and Mies van der Rohe.

A “second Chicago school” emerged in the 1960s when Fazlur Kahn introduced a new method of steel construction and gave birth to a new generation of tall buildings, including the Sears Tower, which, when it was topped out in 1973, was the tallest in the world. Sears remains America's top spot, and those with an iron stomach for heights may be pleased that the building is opening glass enclosed viewing platforms in June. They will extend 4.3 foot beyond the building on inch and a half glass so you can get the window-washers' view down from the 103rd storey.

But Chicago’s light has dimmed as a capital of architecture. Santiago Calatrava hopes to build a 150-storey twisting “spire”, which will supplant the Sears as North America’s tallest, but the proposed site remains a heap of rubble, and the recession may dampen his ambitions. Hence the city has put great hopes in Piano’s Modern Wing. It is serene, efficient, and yet it disappoints. It offers up no singular image: there is no bold gesture, no Tate Modern Turbine Hall that one might learn to love. In fact, the designs that Gehry and Piano have supplied for Chicago point to the twin dangers of “star-chitecture”: bombastic, signature gestures on the one hand, predictable products on the other.

It is telling that the most exciting building currently nearing completion on the Chicago skyline is the first skyscraper by Jeanne Gang, and the largest project yet awarded to an American firm headed by a woman. Called Acqua, it’s a skyscraper-as-waterfall, with curving balconies undulating in and out to evoke rocky outcrops, and areas of reflective glass to suggest cascading torrents. Sometimes, genuine innovation needs new blood."