Milwaukee Art Museum

The Milwaukee Art Museum stands on the shore of Lake Michigan in Wisconsin, its Quadracci Pavilion addition completed in 2001 to a design by the Spanish architect and engineer Santiago Calatrava, his first completed building commission in the United States. The pavilion's defining feature is the Burke Brise Soleil, a moveable sunscreen of steel fins spanning roughly 66 meters, resembling a pair of wings, that opens and closes over the building's glass-vaulted entrance hall at set times each day, weather permitting, functioning as both a functional solar shade and a kinetic architectural sculpture. The pavilion connects to the museum's earlier War Memorial Center building, designed decades before by the Finnish-American architect Eero Saarinen, and to a later addition by the architect David Kahler, so the complex as a whole layers work by three architects across different periods. The museum's dramatic lakefront profile, and the Burke Brise Soleil in particular, has made the building one of the most widely photographed pieces of contemporary architecture in the American Midwest.