Two short words are being heard in offices that have been absent for some time. The words are: “I quit.” In the last three months, more Americans have quit their jobs than were laid off, a sharp contrast with the last few years that points to a gradually thawing jobs market. Although some of the quitters have accepted new jobs when they resign, others have no firm offers except for a new-found confidence that they will be able to find employment quickly. “There is a century’s worth of evidence that bears out this view that quits rise and layoffs fall as the job market improves,” said Steven Davis, a University of Chicago economist.
Long-term trends point to a job market that can only improve. Already this year, the economy has created a net 982,000 jobs following a recession that wiped out more than eight million jobs. According to the federal government, the number of people who quit their jobs in April rose to nearly two million, the most in more than a year and a 12 percent increase over January. Workers were afraid to quit during the darkest months of the recession, and with good reason. Jobs were in short supply; others feared facing layoff because of the “last hired, first fired” principle.
Fear kept many people in their jobs, according to David Adams, vice president of training at Adecco, a national staffing firm, who says that his firm had trouble recruiting people for open jobs during the recession. Now, Adams is seeing more people who have jobs looking to interview versus laid-off workers searching for employment. “The hangover is over. It’s really starting to move toward a market where the employee can have a lot more confidence making a move.”
The opening of the new Modern Wing of the 
horizontal, a symmetrical glass and limestone box that sinks into the earth, Calatrava’s is an expressionist sculpture that ascends and twists into the lakefront air. The signature Calatrava move (similar to his El Alamillo Bridge in Seville) is the pair of beautifully articulated wings that frame the new building, called the Burke Brise Soleil. With a wingspan rivaling a Boeing 747 and weighing 90 tons, they open and close with the museum (and also with the ebb and flow of the wind load). But Calatrava’s greatness is that his wings aren’t merely wings — they are part of a vocabulary of organic shapes that converse with Lake Michigan, echoing waves and stingrays and even skeletal shapes. “The project responds to the culture of the lake: sailboats, the weather, culture, the sense of motion and change,” he said.
For all the splendor of the wings, the arrival on the inside may be the architect’s greatest reach — the Cathedral-like entry, the Windhover Hall, that recalls everything from Gothic to Antoni Gaudi’s unfinished Sagrada Familia in Barcelona — complete with flying buttresses, vaulted ceilings and a nave shaped like a prow that extends into Lake Michigan. Like Piano, Calatrava is reaching back to the scared origins of art and expression to create a building that cloaks its exhibits in silence and suggestions of ancient ritual.