THE SILENT CLIENT
Updated: 11 hours ago
What a collection asks of its casework: On designing the vitrines for the Applied Arts of Europe galleries at the Art Institute of Chicago
Every vitrine in the Applied Arts of Europe galleries has two black finishes. The outside is steel with a final coat applied by hand, because the textured black we wanted could not be produced industrially. The inside is different. The same coat, the one we had worked so hard to get, failed the Oddy test: the conservators' check on whether a material releases compounds that can tarnish or corrode the objects it is meant to protect. So the interior got another finish, and nobody walking through the galleries will ever know.
That is, I think, the whole project in one detail. I designed the casework for these galleries as part of Barozzi Veiga's project, and for a long time I believed my client was the museum. It took me far too many meetings to understand that the client with the strictest requirements was the one who never spoke: the object.
A client with three hundred members and no voice
The galleries bring together some three hundred works of European furniture, silver, ceramics and glass made between 1600 and 1900. The curators had organized those works into groups before we drew a single vitrine, and that decision shaped everything afterwards. Each vitrine was designed for the group that would live inside it: its dimensions, its height, how the lighting was integrated, how humidity and temperature were protected. There was no catalogue system that could have done this, which is why every case is bespoke. It was not an aesthetic position. The collection simply was not standard.
What the objects asked for
Once you start listening, the demands are precise.
Mahogany and ivory furniture sits in a vitrine with an integrated blind, and we ran daylight studies to agree at what hours of the day that blind had to be down. The silver cases have their own special conditions. Every vitrine carries silica gel to hold humidity steady, in quantities set by conservation, not by us. Every material that touched the inside of a case went through Oddy testing before the conservators would approve it. And the ceramics, which the Art Institute collects in depth, asked for something different again: a small, separate gallery, deep blue, with much darker lighting, like a jewel box. That was our idea, and it was accepted almost immediately, which tells you how much the room had been waiting for it.
Each of these demands turned into a design problem. Silica gel in generous quantities had to live inside vitrines whose structure we were trying to make as slight as possible. Lighting had to be integrated, dimmable, and invisible. And the museum wanted to be able to change interior plinths and backgrounds for future rotations without calling in outside contractors, so the cases had to be built to be changed by the people who work there.
The translators
The objects do not speak, so someone has to speak for them. At the Art Institute, that meant the conservators and curators, and I cannot overstate how much of the project depended on them. We met every week. In the early stages we spent days in the storage areas, looking at the collection while they explained the peculiarities of each piece. They knew the groups, the chronology, where every element should go, even the rotations planned years ahead.
And at first, we did not understand each other.
We arrived with a material language already chosen: Belgian blue stone, black steel, terrazzo floors, walls in a very pale grey. The curators were used to a more classical vocabulary, and did not believe it would work with their silver, glass, ceramics, polychrome wood and ivory. I understand their doubt much better now than I did then. We were talking about materials. They were talking about objects. In the end the combination worked, and the curators were delighted, but I would be lying if I told you we reached that point in a straight line. A lot of back and forth could have been avoided if we had begun by listening.
Not everything comes from the object
It would be tidy to say that every constraint came from the collection. It did not. Accessibility rules and the clearances around each case forced us to divide the glass openings into smaller portions to avoid awkward cantilevers, and to leave far more space between vitrines than I would have drawn on instinct, because the collections managers needed room to work. We had to find ways to integrate, elegantly and discreetly, all the locks: one set for the conservators, who reach the silica gel drawers, and another for the curators, who reach the objects. The museum's graphic standards for accessibility were strict, with large labels, large type and a very limited choice of colors, and there was no room to negotiate. These constraints belong to a different category: they come from the people who use the galleries and not from the things inside them. But they are part of the same brief, and they were just as non-negotiable.
Where it became real
The fabricator proposed many of the technical solutions that let us protect the architectural intent, and they were involved in the design from the earliest stages. The profiles of the vitrines, which we had drawn as thin as we dared, ended up being built exactly that way.
We made small mock-ups of materials and details, mostly junctions and corners. Later, before fabrication, we built prototypes of each type of vitrine and went to see them at the factory. That visit changed the project. We adjusted dimensions and materials on the spot, and the bevelled detail where the Belgian blue stone meets the steel plinth was resolved there, with physical tests, in front of the object itself. No drawing would have told us what that visit did.
What it cost
We never had to choose between protecting an object and showing it properly, and I count that among the project's real successes. The vitrines are extremely transparent, with extra-clear glass, and all the conservation measures were absorbed without losing the lines, the materiality or the proportions we started with.
But "we never had to choose" is not the same as "we gave up nothing." The interior does not have the finish of the exterior. The silica gel took space from a structure that wanted to be thinner. The distances between cases are larger than the composition alone would have asked for. Each of these small concessions went the same way, in favor of the object, and I would make every one of them again.
What I would carry into the next one
If I could do this project again, I would listen to the curators earlier and learn the collection before I proposed anything. That is not modesty. It is the most practical piece of advice I have.
The order matters. First the object. Then the people who know it, the curators and conservators. Then the visitor who will stand in front of it. Material comes after all of that, not before, and it is a hard order for an architect to accept, because
material is where we feel most at home. But a vitrine is a promise to an object that cannot ask for anything, and the only way to keep it is to let the object speak first.
Alicia Hernanz is the founder of Anantu.Studio, an independent consultancy for museums and cultural institutions. She spent over a decade with leading European architecture practices, including five years directing the design and delivery of a major U.S. museum expansion.