The East Wing of the Cleveland Museum of Art shows off a composition of rising rectangles and arcs that gently enfold the museumâs neoclassical 1916 building.

You know a building wants to avoid being seen as an architectural icon when it plays hard to photograph.

Architect Rafael Viñoly’s recently completed expansion of the Cleveland Museum of Art is just such a project.

It’s hard to find a single spot from which to snap a picture that captures the essence of the two big wings Viñoly added to the museum.

That’s because the real thrust of Viñoly’s additions is not to claim attention for themselves, but to focus the eye on the museum’s original 1916 building, a lovely neoclassical art palace designed by architects Benjamin S. Hubbell and W. Dominick Benes.

The Cleveland museum project is part of the global explosion of art museum design and construction launched in 1997 by architect Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum branch in Bilbao, Spain.

Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Museum branch in Bilbao, Spain, shown in 2009, revolutionized perceptions of art museum architecture when it opened in 1997.

Sheathed in undulating waves of shiny titanium, the Guggenheim Bilbao showed that art museums could be considered works of art in their own right. It also turned a grimy industrial town with a polluted river and an infamous band of local terrorists into an overnight tourist destination.

Scores of cities have tried to re-create the “Bilbao effect” with an architecturally dramatic theater, library, concert hall or art museum over the past two decades, sometimes with success, sometimes not.

Within that context, the Cleveland museum project shows how the architectural pendulum has swung back since Bilbao toward humility and restraint.

Viñoly’s design embodies the idea that an art museum’s first job is to facilitate looking at art, not to compete with the collections it houses.

When he won the Cleveland museum commission in 2001, Viñoly made it clear he didn’t want to create another architectural icon in Cleveland.

He believed the museum already had two, in its 1916 building and the 1971 Education Wing designed in the Brutalist style by Marcel Breuer. And a block away, Case Western Reserve University was constructing Gehry’s Peter B. Lewis Building. There was no need to follow CWRU’s lead.

Rafael Vinoly's Tokyo Forum features a vast skylight shaped like the skeleton of a ship.

At the time, just four years after Bilbao, Viñoly’s modesty seemed unusual. A forceful and outspoken designer, he was known for big, dramatic urban structures, such as the Pittsburgh Convention Center, with its ski-slope roof, or the Tokyo International Forum, which features a huge skylight engineered like the hull of a ship.

A native of Montevideo, Uruguay, Viñoly grew up and was educated in Argentina, and moved to the United States in 1978. In the early 2000s, he was already well established as the architect of Philadelphia’s enormous Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts, home of the Philadelphia Orchestra, and as a finalist in the competition to replace the Twin Towers at ground zero in New York.

Yet if Viñoly came to Cleveland with an idea that had an anti-Bilbao desire to let art speak loudest, he delivered his message with the force of an ultimatum. To add new gallery space and highlight the museum’s 1916 building and Breuer addition, Viñoly said it would be necessary to demolish two architecturally undistinguished extensions added in 1958 and 1983.

If the trustees hadn’t agreed, Viñoly later said, he wouldn’t have taken the job.

“It’s like surgery,” he said in a 2009 interview. “There is a point at which you cut.”

Culture under glass: Rafael Vinoly's Kimmel Center in Philadelphia is the home of the Philadelphia Orchestra.

Viñoly proposed unifying the expanded museum complex by sheathing his sleek, minimalist wings in white Georgia marble — a material that would echo the Beaux Arts neoclassical facades of the 1916 building — along with granite pinstripes that would echo the facades of the Breuer addition.

The architectural result, when viewed from principal vantages along East Boulevard and Wade Lagoon, is that Viñoly’s big wings defer to the 1916 building, embracing it as the main architectural attraction.

As they wrap around from the north side of the museum to touch the original building, Viñoly’s wings shift from opaque to transparent with a pair of “glass box” galleries and slender glass connectors that tenderly clasp the east and west ends of the 1916 building.

Viñoly cuts loose inside, where visitors striding in from the dark, compressive lobby of the Breuer building experience the sudden spatial release of the big new atrium at the heart of the complex.

The atrium floods the interior of the museum with daylight and performs superbly as a multipurpose facility for public events and as a central point of orientation.

But the real power of the space is that, like other great public rooms, it makes a visitor feel a part of its bigness. It doesn’t dwarf you; it enlarges your sense of potential.

A classical, logical arrangement

On a typical day, when it’s not set up for a special event, the atrium resembles a 21st-century indoor version of the piazzas painted by Canaletto in 18th-century Venice, or a super-sleek revision of the Main Concourse in New York’s Grand Central Terminal.

It also very clearly shows off the gleaming white north facade of the 1916 building, restored to pristine condition after the removal of the 1958 addition that once bisected it.

From the atrium, a visitor can easily spot numerous destinations that flank it at ground level, including a cafe and restaurant, a gift shop and the museum’s Gallery One, its award-winning and technologically innovative educational gallery.

Stunning: The atrium of the Cleveland Museum of Art frames the museum's white, marble, 1916 building as a gemlike museum-within-a-museum.

Viñoly’s additions are modernist in style, but his floor plan, overall, clearly echoes the classical symmetry of the 1916 building, which features straight-line sequences of galleries organized around a large, central rotunda.

The enlarged museum repeats this fundamental arrangement on a larger scale, with the atrium as the centerpiece. The spatial logic is so clear you can feel it in your bones.

Walking through the museum, especially on its second level, is a delight. From the east and west ends of the 1916 building to the “glass connectors” and the “glass box” galleries on the south ends of each wing, the museum appears to open up to connect the experience of art to the outside world.

The views create an opportunity to pause, refresh and choose your next artistic destination, always while feeling supremely oriented.

Many Clevelanders say they hate the pair of twin concrete towers Viñoly installed on the north side of the atrium as counterweights to the big skylight that soars over the space.

Some Clevelanders object to the concrete elevator and stair towers at the expanded Cleveland Museum of Art, saying the structures look too industrial for leafy University Circle.

The rap against the towers is that they look too high, and too industrial for leafy University Circle. I disagree. I think the vertical notes provided by the towers counterbalance the horizontal shapes formed by Viñoly’s East and West wings, and contrast pleasingly with the upward-curving arc of the skylight.

It’s easy to quibble that the museum’s restaurant and cafe, located on the west side of the atrium, should have been located on the northeast corner of the museum, where they would have been independently accessible from East Boulevard.

But Jeffrey Strean, the museum’s director of design and architecture, said that Katharine Lee Reid, the museum’s director from 2000 to 2005, determined that the institution’s conservation lab belonged on the northeast corner to take advantage of the steady north light needed by conservators.

It’s another example of how art came first in the Viñoly project.

Looking forward and outward

The completion of the expansion means that the museum now fully occupies its 4-acre site in the midst of Wade Oval and Cleveland’s Fine Arts Garden.

If it needs more gallery space in the future, it could find it within its existing structure by moving nonessential functions, such as its library, off-site.

This explains why the museum was very smart last year to buy the 4.1-acre property of the Cleveland Institute of Art, across East Boulevard, for $9.2 million, in collaboration with CWRU.

Room to grow? The Cleveland Museum of Art and Case Western Reserve University last year bought a 4.1 acre site belonging to the Cleveland Institute of Art.

That purchase sets up the possibility of creating a nationally significant art history institute across the street from the museum, possibly with an underground connection.

In the meantime, the museum should animate its present site with a sculpture garden or other forms of public art, and figure out how it could be better connected to surrounding neighborhoods, particularly to Hough and the future CWRU western campus to the west, across Martin Luther King Jr. Drive and East 105th Street.

The Viñoly project has left the museum vastly improved as a place to view art, and with plenty of exciting possibilities for the future. That’s what it needed, and that’s what Viñoly delivered.