Milwaukee Art Museum

Listen for a moment. Wind comes off Lake Michigan, cold and clean, and it carries the faint smell of water and wet stone. Above you, white steel ribs rise and spread like the wings of a great bird. The light here is bright even on grey days, because the lake throws it back at the sky. Before we talk about art or architects, notice how the building and the water seem to belong to each other.

This is the Milwaukee Art Museum, and it is really several buildings joined together. The white winged structure is the Quadracci Pavilion, designed by the Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava. It opened in 2001. It was his first completed building in the United States. Calatrava trained as both an architect and an engineer, and you can feel both sides of that training here. Every curve is also a calculation.

Those wings have a name. They form the Burke Brise Soleil, and a brise soleil is simply a sunscreen, a structure that shades a building from direct sun. Most sunscreens sit still. This one moves. The ribs can fold down and lift up again, and their full span is broader than the wings of a jumbo jet. Sensors watch the wind. When gusts grow too strong, the wings close on their own to protect the structure.

Here is something many visitors miss. The movement is not only for show. When the wings are open, they cut glare and heat in the great glass hall below. When they close, they lie over that hall like a lid. So the building changes its shape across the day and across the seasons. If you come back at a different hour, you may see a different building. Watch the ribs carefully, and you can see that each one is a separate piece.

Now walk inside, into Windhover Hall. The name comes from a poem about a falcon by the English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. The space is tall, white and almost empty. Glass fills the far end and frames the lake. The ribs of the ceiling repeat overhead, and many people say it feels like standing inside the hull of a ship, or inside the ribcage of a whale. Stand still. Sound carries strangely here, and footsteps travel a long way.

Calatrava looked to the lake for his ideas. Sailboats, waves and seabirds all seem to appear in the design. The pavilion points toward the water like the prow of a ship. Outside, a long pedestrian bridge runs from the museum back toward downtown. It is held by cables strung from a single tall, slanted mast. Walk across it, and you are walking a line that ties the city streets directly to the shoreline.

But the white wings are the newest chapter, not the first. The older part of the museum sits beside them. It is the War Memorial Center, designed by the Finnish American architect Eero Saarinen and completed in the 1950s. Saarinen also designed the Gateway Arch in Saint Louis. His building here is concrete and bold, and parts of it reach out over open air. It honours people who served in war, and that purpose remains part of the site today.

Later, in the 1970s, another addition joined the complex, designed by the Milwaukee architect David Kahler. So when you move through the galleries, you are moving through decades of architectural thinking. The ceilings change height. The light changes from bright glass to softer, enclosed rooms. Pay attention to these shifts. They tell you, without any sign, that you have crossed from one building into another.

The museum itself is older than all of these walls. Its roots go back to the late nineteenth century, when local art collectors and art societies began to build public galleries in Milwaukee. Over time, those early institutions joined together. The result is the museum you see now. Its collection holds tens of thousands of works, from ancient objects to contemporary pieces made in our own time.

A few areas of the collection are especially strong. The museum holds a large group of works by Georgia O'Keeffe, the painter known for her close-up flowers and desert landscapes. Many visitors do not realise that O'Keeffe was born in Wisconsin. The museum is also known for its Haitian art, which is one of the notable public collections of its kind outside Haiti. These paintings are full of colour, spirit figures and scenes from daily life.

Look out, too, for folk art and the work of self-taught artists. These are people who never studied in an academy. They made art from what they had and what they believed. The museum also keeps strong holdings in German Expressionism, an early twentieth century movement with bold colours and raw emotion. Moving between these rooms, you meet very different ideas of what art can be.

When you need a break from the galleries, step outside again. The gardens beside the pavilion are laid out in clean geometric lines. They were designed by the landscape architect Dan Kiley. Hedges and paths repeat the strong lines of the buildings. From the lakefront path, joggers and cyclists pass by, and gulls ride the wind above the water. The museum is part of the daily life of the shore, not separate from it.

Before you leave, turn once more toward the wings. Notice how the white steel changes colour with the sky — warm at the edges in late light, almost silver under cloud. Listen to the water against the breakwall. Feel the wind that the building is always measuring. Then, as you walk back across the bridge toward the city, look over your shoulder... and see the whole structure resting on the edge of the lake, ready to open again.