The MIA was built with a few missing limbs. The original plan more closely resembles Versailles than the museum that was built, and it wasn’t long—about a decade, actually—before the MIA began to crave more room.
The original model of the Minneapolis Institute of Art. About a seventh of it was built in 1915.
In 1925, the museum sought to remedy this the same way it began: by throwing a dinner for wealthy men. In one night, about 200 of them essentially raised the necessary funds. The ladies in the Friends of the Institute did their part, too, raising “more than $1,000 a minute,” as they later bragged—$24,000 in 20 minutes. It was a good time to be a museum.
Finished in 1927, the new spaces added about half the size of the previous footprint, with the airy new 700-seat Pillsbury Auditorium accounting for most of the square footage. The other new areas—a lunchroom, nine galleries, and several lecture rooms—have largely been repurposed since then, and today the addition is easily overlooked, particularly compared to subsequent ones.
That was partly by design: The addition was pitched as a continuation of the original ambitions, and in the throes of prosperity who was to say that the palatial design wouldn’t eventually be completed? Perhaps it would accrete, little by little, like a great cathedral.