CHICAGO -- Of America's great cities, Chicago feels big, brawny and Midwestern-friendly. So it seems natural that the city's' two newest civic blockbusters, the Modern Wing of the Art Institute of Chicago and Millennium Park, have cozied up to each other like the best of pals along that glorious Lake Michigan shoreline.

The Modern Wing opened in May, and Millennium Park celebrated its fifth birthday in July. Italian architect Renzo Piano has created an elegant, restrained building for the Art Institute that works almost as call and response to architect Frank Gehry's exuberant music pavilion in next-door Millennium Park.

Where Gehry's Jay Pritzker Pavilion peels back glittering stainless steel petals like an exploding rose, Piano's Modern Wing answers in calm, vertical lines of glass, steel and limestone. Where Gehry's BP Footbridge squiggles through the landscape, Piano's 620-foot-long Nichols Bridgeway shoots a straight line from the Art Institute above Monroe Street into the park.

``We tried very hard,'' said Erin Hogan, the Art Institute's director of public affairs, ``to remove any obstacle to people filtering out of Millennium Park and into the building.''

Families can walk across the Nichols Bridgeway and enter the new education center on the ground floor -- for free. Children's book authors may be reading at story time, or junior artists may be invited to make their own collages.

In fine weather, diners can eat outside or just relax among the sculptures on the Bluhm Family Terrace, a space Institute President James Cuno has said is ``at the heartbeat of Chicago.'' Access to the terrace and Terzo Piano is free.

To check out the art, visitors head downstairs to pay and then step into a dazzling world that spotlights both masterworks and the world outdoors.

Floor-to-ceiling windows, doubled-paned and double-shaded, give an almost Impressionistic blurring to the park and city skyline beyond. One gallery's juxtaposition is priceless: A hazy view out to Gehry's Pritzker Pavilion rears up beside Surrealist Rene Magritte's Time Transfixed, a realistically painted scene of a locomotive improbably chugging through a fireplace.

``It's architecture made of very few things -- stone, steel and glass,'' said Ed Keegan, architecture critic for Chicago Public Radio and a contributing editor for Architect Magazine. ``Especially for something so big.''

The Modern Wing, at 264,000 square feet, adds a third to the size of the Institute. It allowed four collections that cover art from 1900 on to move in, and the museum's remaining six collections to stretch out and breathe in the original 1893 Beaux Arts building and previous additions. The Institute is now 1.2 million square feet, second in size only to New York's' Metropolitan Museum among U.S. art museums.

The project, a decade in the making, had a budget as big as its footprint: $294 million for design and construction; $85 million for its operating endowment; and $22 million for reinstallation of works. The total tops $400 million, ``99.999 percent of which came from private support and foundations,'' Hogan said.

``The Modern Wing fits a particular strain of Chicago architecture, with sophistication and elegance,'' Keegan said admiringly as he looked at the north facade. ``I think it's probably the finest building finished in Chicago in 20 or 30 years, and the best building downtown since the Hancock Building in 1970.''

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