Head to the Midwest for the shape of things to come

One great building after another has long made Chicago Marcus Field's kind of town. But from there he ventured out across the prairies of Illinois, Ohio and Wisconsin to discover that they too possessed the pioneering architectural spirit

It's 10am and I'm standing on a bridge looking out across Lake Michigan. The sun is glinting on the vast stretch of silver water and I'm quietly taking in the view. Suddenly, my reverie is interrupted when the building in front of me begins to move. At first it's hardly perceptible, just a silent twitch as two giant white metal wings start to rise up above the structure on the edge of the lake. A few minutes later and the building resembles a waking bird, unfurling itself and reaching into the sky. Finally the wings come to a halt and the doorway to the building beckons. I run down the stairs; I can't wait to get inside.

It's 10am and I'm standing on a bridge looking out across Lake Michigan. The sun is glinting on the vast stretch of silver water and I'm quietly taking in the view. Suddenly, my reverie is interrupted when the building in front of me begins to move. At first it's hardly perceptible, just a silent twitch as two giant white metal wings start to rise up above the structure on the edge of the lake. A few minutes later and the building resembles a waking bird, unfurling itself and reaching into the sky. Finally the wings come to a halt and the doorway to the building beckons. I run down the stairs; I can't wait to get inside.

Of course, this is exactly the reaction that the people who run the Milwaukee Art Museum want you to have, and the reason why they commissioned the superstar Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava - designer of skeletal Athens Olympic stadium - to build them the most spectacular museum extension in the world. Why else would you go to Milwaukee except to see this? In fact, why else would you go to the Midwest? A whole tract of the US covering several states, it is generally written off by potential British visitors as a terrifying place of grim weather and dull prairies populated by rabid right-wingers who think George Bush is the saviour of their nation.

I went with a plan to visit a handful of new art galleries, all of them as distinguished by their architecture as by the collections they house. But I was also keen to discover the truth for myself: could I survive a night in Illinois? Would I wish a plague on the people of Wisconsin? Would I die of boredom in Ohio?

I decided to ease myself in gently. Chicago is the region's urban hub (remember Doris Day arriving there from cowboy country and causing mayhem, in Calamity Jane?) and the obvious place to start a trip. It's also home to the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), one of a triptych of galleries to be built by A-list European architects in the Midwest over the past decade and one of the largest in the US devoted to post-war art.

On the evening I arrived the Chicago art world was en fête for the opening of an exhibition of work by Lee Bontecou, a veteran American artist of the 1960s. I asked one visitor what he thought of the building. "Ugh! I hate it," he spat. "It looks like a bank." He has a point. It's a forbidding concrete bunker designed by the Berlin-based architect Josef Kleihues and completed in 1996. Certainly, it has none of the pizzazz we have come to expect from museums since Frank Gehry's Bilbao Guggenheim wowed the world when it opened in 1997. But it's exquisitely crafted, and the white-walled galleries are the perfect setting for a changing display of works from the collection, including star turns by Jasper Johns, Donald Judd, Andy Warhol and Bruce Nauman.

I rather like the brutalism of Chicago's MCA, but competition between notable works of contemporary architecture in this city is stiff. On the campus of the Illinois Institute of Technology (itself designed by Mies van der Rohe, the Bauhaus guru who made the city his home) you can see a new building by Rem Koolhaas, the celebrity Dutch architect and author of the cult design volume S,M,L,XL. While only this summer a spectacular music pavilion by Frank Gehry and an outsize sculpture by British artist Anish Kapoor were both completed in the lakeside Millennium Park. Future plans for the city include an extension to the Art Institute by the Pompidou Centre's Italian co-designer Renzo Piano. It's enough to leave an architecture buff breathless, particularly when there's also Frank Lloyd Wright's home to visit in smart Oak Park. And if you weren't convinced by the futuristic vision of shiny, high-rise Chicago in the recent movie I, Robot, take a trip up to the 94th-floor observatory of the John Hancock Center and you'll see it's not so far-fetched.

After a few days at Chicago's colourful Allegro hotel - a good-value showbiz favourite - I began to think the Midwest would be a breeze. But then came the serious test: a two-day trip to Milwaukee, Wisconsin's largest city, just 145km up the banks of Lake Michigan. I decided to go by train, which turned out to be a good decision because for a modest $20 fare you get to experience Chicago's handsome neo-classical Union station as well as a quintessential American landscape of fields and dinky wooden houses.

Milwaukee doesn't look particularly exciting from the station, just a regular American city of straight roads and dull commercial buildings. But things began to look up when I arrived at the Art Museum. After watching the wings open on Calatrava's extension, an event which is now a daily attraction at 10am, I was greeted by the museum's British director David Gordon. "That's why I'm here," he shouted enthusiastically, as the building finally settled. "I was bowled over." Gordon, who ran the Royal Academy in London, came to the museum in 2001, soon after the completion of the $100m extension.

And there's no question that his new home is spectacular. It's a bit like being inside the fabulous lair of a James Bond villain, with its elliptical windows, concrete ribs and white marble floors. There are some fine new galleries for temporary exhibitions, but in truth the Calatrava building is more of an elaborate entrance pavilion. Calatrava himself has since won several other major commissions in the US, including the job of designing the new transport interchange on the World Trade Center site.

There is a good historical display of European painting and sculpture, but what makes this place special is the fine collection built up by the local philanthropist Peggy Bradley. In the early 1970s she gave more than 600 works of modern art to the museum, along with $1m to build the galleries to house them. A little Braque was her first piece, but by the time she died in 1978 her collection included major works by Kirchner, Picasso, Rothko and Warhol.

You could see this museum in a day trip from Chicago, but it's worth making an overnight stay to sample some of Milwaukee's other pleasures. I saw a play at The Rep, an experimental theatre, and took a tour with Historic Milwaukee; the walk around the streets of 19th-century timber houses on the East Side and the bohemian shops around the pretty Brady Street area is particularly enjoyable.

I couldn't leave the region without a visit to the art gallery designed by the Iraqi-born British architect Zaha Hadid in Cincinnati, a short flight from Chicago. Outside it looks like a conventional modern office building that has been cut up and stuck back together again with its walls and windows all out of kilter. Its façade is made up of giant blocks of black and white concrete interspersed with strips of glass. Another roll of concrete swoops up the back of the building like a curling piece of lasagne.

Inside the CAC is like a kooky Expressionist dream: imagine the set from The Cabinet of Dr Caligari crossed with a house of fun. The galleries are all asymmetrical; no wall seems straight. I had a great time climbing up its criss-crossing black staircases and discovering the exhibits laid out in its misshapen galleries; it's the perfect setting for both the joyful and the nihilistic products of contemporary art. It's also a triumph for Zaha Hadid: so great has been the impact of the building in the US that she was awarded the 2004 Pritzker Prize, the world's most prestigious award for architecture.

The interest generated by the building has also refreshed Cincinnati's position on the US cultural map. And, as my guide for the CAC, Katie Taft, soon explained, the city has plenty to show off about. I dimly remembered the existence of a President William Taft, and she told me that he was her ancestor and a local resident. You can visit his birthplace as well as the Taft Museum, the mansion of his brother, which is considered to be one of the finest examples of neo-Palladian architecture in the US. Cincinnati played a prominent role in the abolitionist movement - Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin here - and its position on the border with the slave state of Kentucky made it a destination for those slaves who risked their lives on the "underground railroad" attempting to cross the frozen Ohio River. A new museum, the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, tells their story.

There is only one downside to Cincinnati as far as I'm concerned, and that is that they don't drink much (several neighbouring counties are dry). My hosts looked amazed when I polished off a bottle of wine on my own and then proceeded to sample Kentucky whiskies neat.

Am I starting to sound like a Midwest evangelist? Well, the truth is that I loved Ohio. Wisconsin and Illinois are wonderful. It rubs off, you see. And the new architecture? I think it's the sprinkling of glitter dust that's made the whole region shine brightly again.

GIVE ME THE FACTS

How to get there

Marcus Field travelled with American Airlines (0845-778 9789; www.americanairlines.co.uk). The total cost of a return flight from London Heathrow to Chicago with an internal flight to and from Cincinnati starts at £250 return in early December.

Where to stay

Hotel Allegro, 171 West Randolph Street, Chicago (00 1 312 236 0123; www.allegrochicago.com) offers double rooms from $113 (£59) per night with breakfast. Hotel Metro, 411 East Mason Street, Milwaukee (00 1 414 272 1937; www.hotelmetro.com) offers double rooms from $169 (£89) per night without breakfast.

Cincinnatian Hotel, 601 Vine St, Cincinnati (00 1 513 381 3000; www.cincinnatianhotel.com) offers double rooms from $247 (£130) without breakfast.

What to see

Museum of Contemporary Art, 220 East Chicago Avenue, Chicago, Illinois 60611 (00 1 312 280 2660; www.mcachicago.org);

Milwaukee Art Museum, 700 North Art Museum Drive, Milwaukee,(00 1 414 224 3220; www.mam.org);

Lois & Richard Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art, 44 East Sixth Street, Cincinnati, 00 1 513 345 8400; www.contemporaryartscenter.org);

Historic Milwaukee (for walking tours) 828 North Broadway, Suite 110, Milwaukee (00 1 414 277 7795; www.historicmilwaukee.org); Harriet Beecher Stowe House, 2950 Gilbert Avenue (State Route 3 / US Route 22), Cincinnati (00 1 513 221 7900; www.ohiohistory.org/places/stowe).

Further information

Great Lakes (01564 794999; www.greatlakesnorthamerica.co.uk).