Two issues ago, in time with the opening of Lausanne’s Cantonal Museum of Fine Arts, we highlighted the splendid international trajectory of Barozzi Veiga, dotted as it is with building works as iconic as the Mieczyslaw Karlowicz Philharmonic Hall in Szczecin, Poland, which capped the 2015 Mies van der Rohe Award, or the Bündner Kunstmuseum in Chur, Switzerland. News of the Barcelona firm’s landing the commission to develop the transformation of the Art Institute of Chicago campus simply reconfirms its global standing, and its list of European achievements is now crowned by a major American project.

The exact scope of the job has yet to be made public, but we know that the museum campus on the Lake Michigan shore will be redefined through a masterplan involving some demolitions, some new museums, reorganized exhibits, and a new urban image for the complex. The latter is fundamental in Barozzi Veiga’s proposal, which seeks to do away with the introverted nature of the superblock that contains the museum, to incorporate existing train tracks into the campus, and strengthen the AIC’s rapport with green zones by improving pedestrian paths.