Art Institute of Chicago

Where it sits. The museum faces Michigan Avenue at number 111, on the eastern edge of the Loop, with Grant Park and the lake behind it and the Michigan Avenue street wall of 1920s towers opposite. Its Beaux-Arts front block was built for the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 by Shepley, Rutan and Coolidge, intended from the outset to pass to the Art Institute once the fair closed. Behind that façade the institution has grown eastward in stages, over and around the Illinois Central railway tracks, until it now spans them entirely. The most recent addition, Renzo Piano's Modern Wing of 2009, faces north across Monroe Street and connects to Millennium Park by the Nichols Bridgeway, a 190-metre steel footbridge that lands beside the Pritzker Pavilion.

The lions. The two bronze lions flanking the Michigan Avenue steps were modelled by Edward Kemeys and installed in May 1894, a gift from Mrs Henry Field. They are not a matched pair, and the museum's own descriptions distinguish them: the south lion stands in an attitude of defiance, the north one is on the prowl, head lowered. Each is a little over three metres long. Chicago dresses them for civic occasions — evergreen wreaths at Christmas, and helmets or jerseys when a local team reaches a championship — a habit that began as an improvisation and is now expected.

On screen. Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1986) shot two extended sequences inside these galleries, and both are unusually reverent for a teen comedy. Ferris and Sloane kiss in front of Marc Chagall's America Windows, the six stained-glass panels the artist gave the museum in 1977; the blue light in that shot is entirely practical. Cameron then stands before Georges Seurat's A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, and the camera cuts progressively tighter on the face of the small girl in the foreground until the image dissolves into individual dots of paint — a sequence about a boy realising there is nothing there to hold onto. John Hughes had spent time in these rooms as a young man and described the museum as a refuge; he shot the scenes on location rather than reconstructing them.

What hangs here. The collection runs to roughly 300,000 objects, and the paintings alone would justify a day. Beyond the Seurat, the second-floor European rooms hold Gustave Caillebotte's Paris Street; Rainy Day, one of the largest groups of Monet's series paintings outside France, and a strong Toulouse-Lautrec and Cézanne holding assembled by Chicago collectors in the 1920s and 1930s. The American galleries hold Edward Hopper's Nighthawks, painted in 1942 and bought by the museum within months, and Grant Wood's American Gothic of 1930, which is considerably smaller in person than almost anyone expects. In the basement, the Thorne Miniature Rooms present sixty-eight interiors at one-twelfth scale, built in the 1930s and 1940s and still the fixation of a certain kind of visitor.

The Modern Wing. Piano's 2009 building added around 24,000 square metres and gave the twentieth-century collection room it had never had. Its defining element is the aluminium sunscreen floating above the roof — the architect called it a flying carpet — which filters north light down through the third-floor galleries so that Picasso, Matisse and the German Expressionists can be shown in daylight. The Bluhm Family Terrace on the third floor is one of the better free-standing views of Millennium Park, and the ground-floor Griffin Court, a full-height glazed hall, functions as an indoor street in a city where that matters for five months of the year.

Getting there and timing. Adams/Wabash on the Loop elevated is one block west, and every downtown line stops within ten minutes' walk. Winter is the museum's secret: Chicago's cold keeps numbers down, the galleries are warm, and the Michigan Avenue lions look better with snow on them. Summer weekends, especially when a festival is running in Grant Park, are the worst of it. Entry from the Modern Wing on Monroe Street is usually faster than the main steps and is the step-free route. Allow three hours as a minimum, plan two or three destinations rather than a full circuit, and use the Nichols Bridgeway on the way out — it delivers you into Millennium Park at the level of the Pritzker Pavilion's steel trellis, which is the best angle on Frank Gehry's bandshell there is.