A New Museum of Contemporary Art Designed by Josef Paul Kleihues and completed in 1996, the MCA building was conceived from a Neo-Rationalist perspective. With a relentless and uniform grid, the building aspired to construct an architectural dialogue that would bridge two modes of architecture—those represented by Schinkel’s Altes Museum on the one hand and Mies van der Rohe’s Neue Nationalgalerie on the other. Situated on an open, gently sloping park space in an urban canyon, the MCA is positioned as a transverse block within the city grid and links the pedestrian thoroughfare of Michigan Avenue to Lake Michigan. Twenty years after the current structure was built, the museum’s collection and programming have outgrown their facilities and will need to double in size, requiring a new building separated from the old by a sculpture garden. The studio began with students conducting research on examples of the Architectural Double and studying the city of Chicago as a museum. Each student then designed a
The Architectural Double in the Museum City
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on synchronous opposites rather than direct duplication to amplify the curated artifact. Because it replicates only once, the Architectural Double is neither one nor many. It extends O. M. Ungers’s notion of the Dialectical City to the notion of coincidentia oppositorum— the unity of opposites. By perpetuating a persistent dialogue between the original and the copy, the Double emphasizes contrasts between sameness and difference, between one type of architecture and another, between the ideology and style of the recent past and those of today. All of these issues are in constant oscillation within the Architectural Double. The studio took the original Museum of Contemporary Art as a point of departure in designing a Double—a new building of the exact same size and program as a counterpoint to the original on an adjacent site. As a doppelgänger of the existing building, the new one must incorporate what was inarticulate or weak in the original as a component of a new coherent whole, turning it into something positive. Together, the museums form an urban diptych and become a singular artifact.