Christo and Jeanne-Claude
Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Wrapped
and
Wrapped Floor and Stairway
Chicago, 1968-69

....If any building ever needed wrapping, it was Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art, a
banal, one story edifice (with a below-ground gallery) having about as much architectural charm as an old shoe box. Built in the early 1900's, it had once been a bakery and, later, the headquarters of Playboy Enterprises.

Christo and Jeanne-Claude considered the building perfect, because it looks like a package already, very anonymous. Its facade is a fake wall covering the original structure.

Although they had just wrapped the Bern Museum in translucent plastic, the Christos decided for aesthetic reasons to shroud the Chicago museum in greenish-brown tarpaulin, which would give greater physical presence to the building and make a better contrast with the snow.

The wrapping commenced on January 15,1969. Students from the school of the Chicago Art Institute of Design assisted for two days on the outside of the building, which was garbed in 10,000 square feet (900 square meters) of heavy tarpaulin and 4,000 feet (1.219 meters) of Manila rope. Every precaution was taken to assure the public's safety. No exits were covered, no windows existed to cover, and small openings were cut in the tarpaulin to keep the building's air vents unobstructed. To be doubly safe, the museum's director, Jan van der Marck, prevailed upon Christo and Jeanne-Claude not to wrap the roof of the museum.

The finished package had a stateliness and sobriety that considerably enhanced the building. In contrast to the Bern museum, with its veil of translucent plastic billowing like a loose summer garment, the Chicago museum was tightly swathed in heavy tarpaulins, as if bundled against the city's blustery winter winds and snow.

As a finishing touch, Christo wrapped the vertical signpost outside the museum in transparent polyethylene.....

.....In conjunction with the wrapping of the museum, the Christos made a complementary work for the interior, Wrapped Floor and Stairway..... The museum's lower gallery had first been emptied of everything and then painted white.

When the painters were through they removed their dropcloths and the Christos laid 2,800 square feet of their off-white dropcloth secured with ropes.. The cotton dropcloths had been
carefully selected for their particular color and texture.....

Excerpts from the book Christo by David Bourdon.
Harry N. Abrams, Inc., Publishers, New York, ©1970.
Edited and updated by Susan Astwood, June 2000.