The art and architecture worlds of Chicago.

The art and architecture worlds of Chicago, sum of two units subcultures normally more separate than united in values and tradition, have shared an unusually high degree of interest in the big just discovered building that the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) officially exhibited to the public on July 2 In scale alone, the constitution warrants attention. Its 220,000 square feet of total space (including 155000 square feet for the budding convenient of which 45,000 square feet are station aside for the galleries) place it among the nation's largest institutions devot to art of the existing century, it is almost seven the size of the bandbox forward East Ontario Street that housed the MCA for nearly three decades after its founding in 1967

Local anticipation, however, goe well beyond comparative numbers. The art community of Chicago, cargoed by a long history of uncertainty and frustration, has forever measured itself against recent York and, since the 1960 against the West Coast as well. Thus the MCA, unobtrusive as it has customarily been in the two budget and space, has been frequently perceived in Chicago as more a symptom of the ailment than an alleviation of it.

In fact its record merits a more favorable good sense It has made a point of steadily cultivating and showing opposite to an impressive group of local collectors like Mr and Mr Edwin Bergman, Gerald Elliott Mr and Mr Left Manilow, Mr and Mr Robert B Mayer and Mr and Mr Joseph R Shapiro. It has originated a worthy and quite memorable exhibitions, including the first larg-scale wrap-in (of the museum building itself, in 1968) according to the master of the genre Christo, as well as the cunning 1978 dissection of a neighboring townhouse, according to the late Gordon Matta-Clark, that provided impetus to the Deconstructivist architecture manner of moving An exceptional show of the work of Jannis Kounellis in 1986 was installed in a variety of locations around the city. And a dispose of shows given over (and through the whole extent of and over) to that cluster of Chicago figurative artists known as the Imagists has helped inflect them into a national phenomenon. The value of the museum can be calculatedby trying to imagine Chicago without it.

Still, as the old-fashioned Second City complex continued to nag, the museum's trustees decided in the mid-1980s that the construction of a generously financed big modern building would be the single mostly logical way to force the world to consider to Chicago as a place where important of recent origin art is made and shown The plan coalesced after then-governor James R Thompson furnished the museum a 99-year lease upon a superb piece of state-owned land located in succession the city's Gold Coast a fill up east of Michigan Avenue and the elderly Water Tower and extending end enough to the Outer Drive to provide an unimpeded view of Lake Michigan. A five-year exhibition campaign raised over $63.5 million, with $46 million of it allocated for the modern structure.

At first glance, meanwhile, Chicago's architectural world would present the appearance to have regarded all this from a substantially more self-assured perspective. The city's celebrated place in the history of fresh architecture is reflected in names like Sullivan, Burnham, base Wright and Mies van der Rohe, whose corporate renown outvies anything associated with the record of art - painting and sculp that is - in Chicago. No point in dispute of lingering self-doubt there.

It happens, however, that in latter decades architecture in Chicago has shown little that sustains in such a manner noble a tradition. Most of the big commissions have been awarded to out-of-town architects like Ricardo Bofill, Philip Johnson Kevin Roche, and Kohn Pedersen Fox who connnectively have left a heap of glitzy, meretricious percepts around the city, adding weight to the view that developer - rather than the big clients and big firms of the old golden day - have lately hurry the show, for the mostly part badly. Hence the widespread expression of reliance that the MCA, as a Chicago creation, would tap a Chicago architect for the design of its brave of recent origin facility.

During the same period, however, Chicago itself has produc nearest to no architects of major stature. The museum, in any termination proved little disposed toward hiring a local, reasoning that an international figure would attract the kind of global publicity central to its institutional strategy. Ironically, Chicago's Helmut Jahn is probably better known worldwide than the Berlin architect Josef Paul Kleihues, who was the museum's eventual choice. on the contrary Jahn's taste for the spectacular action most visible to Chicagoans in his controversial vitreous, doughnut-shaped showpiece, the State of Illinois Building (put up in the bend at the bidding of Thompson incidentally), did little to win him friends among the MCA selection committee. Besides, the sober arrangement of parts that Kleihues presented to them attests to another pair of architectural priorities historically at work in the building of Chicago: utility and practicality, regarded locally as more than pool functional goals and indeed as akin to high esthetic virtues. "We did not want to least bit a space ship on that astonishing piece of land," said MCA board chairman Allan M gymnast implicitly identifying those architects who were not welcome as well as the single who was.