Two years ago, when workers began excavations for the Chicago Academy of Sciences’ new building in Lincoln Park, they found a piece of very old Chicago that nobody knew existed anymore. They made their discovery as they dug through a large dirt mound they assumed was a pile of landfill overgrown by scraggly trees and underbrush.
“It turned out to be a sand dune,” said Ralph Johnson, the powerhouse architect at Perkins & Will who designed the $30 million Nature Museum, scheduled to open early next summer at Fullerton Parkway and Cannon Drive. “It was part of the interdunal pond system that was here when the first European settlers began coming here 200 years ago.”
The setting for the new building is a lush, landmark corner in one of America’s greatest urban parks. It is the first museum allowed on parkland since the Adler Planetarium and Shedd Aquarium went up in Grant Park in 1930.
It seems certain that the Nature Museum, with its highly innovative new exhibits, will attract far more visitors than the academy did in its old home, the Laflin Memorial Building at 2001 N. Clark St. (now offices of the Lincoln Park Zoo). The staff believes annual visitorship will at least double annual attendance to 200,000.
If there is any controversy about putting it in the park, it stems from nervousness on the part of nearby residents. Putting up a museum that has no visitor parking but promises to lure even more people to a neighborhood already suffering from gridlock has raised some eyebrows, but never enough to give rise to a serious, organized effort to oppose it.
As the city’s oldest public museum, opened in 1857, the Chicago Academy of Sciences has weathered far more serious threats than complaints about traffic and parking, surviving two devastating fires, in 1866 and 1871. In 1893 the new Field Museum soon became one of the biggest natural history collections in the world, consigning the academy forever as a “little brother” to the city’s big museums.
For the last year and a half, workers have taken meticulous care to leave as many mature trees as possible while putting up the new 73,000-square-foot building. Consequently, Johnson’s design, a massive, tree-high glass and concrete block of trapezoidal shapes unlike anything around it, has risen almost inconspicuously. That it is being built on top of an ancient sand dune along an equally old interdunal pond is perhaps ironic.
When the first settlers began putting up their cabins along the Chicago River at Lake Michigan in the 1790s, the lakefront then was a beach. A few steps away from water’s edge, the beach rose steeply into sand dunes that stretched for miles north and south of the river.
Climbing the dunes and staring inland, those early settlers saw the marsh that half a century later would begin to take shape as a great city. Beyond the marsh they saw an undulating, wind-swaying tall-grass prairie, a terrestrial ocean teeming with plant and animal life. Here and there the flat, grassy expanse was punctuated by stands of trees, some widely spaced savanna-fashion, others more tightly packed in dark, shady forests.
Urban expansion has almost completely extirpated that complex biotic system, not just along the lake but throughout the entire six-county Chicago region.
The wilderness those first dune-climbing settlers saw is being re-created for the new museum as walk-through dioramas that hark back to the ones in the academys old museum. But little else in the new building will remind visitors of the charming old Laflin building, which housed conventional display cases of natural history collections.
The new museum will more resemble the science center museums that many cities have built in the last couple of decades. Not reliant on vast collections and research, science centers concentrate more on using hands-on and walk-through exhibitry to immerse and instruct visitors in science concepts.
The academy still has its small but valuable natural history collection from the old museum, but in a warehouse far from the new facility. The new building is given over almost entirely to brand-new, nowhere-else-to-be-found exhibits designed and invented by the academy’s own staff.
Much of the new museum will feature living exhibits, including public park trails through its 6-acre-plus site, populated with trees and wildflowers calculated to attract an abundance of wildlife. Inside, the centerpiece exhibit area will be a soaring, permanent, indoor butterfly haven that will mimic midsummer weather all year long, creating a flowering, 4,500-square-foot field to walk through.
Some of the best exhibitry inside the building is designed to make visitors aware of often-unnoticed wildlife thriving everywhere in urban and suburban neighborhoods, from back yards to under toilet seats.
That concept will be displayed most graphically in a two-story balloon frame house constructed inside the museum. Children will be able to enter the house through a culvert and sewer pipe under the back yard.
“They’ll see how the typical Chicago-area house is built on land that once was wild prairie or woodland,” said Kevin Coffee, the Chicago-born exhibits manager for New York’s American Museum of Natural History whom the academy lured home last year to head its exhibits department.
“Possums, rabbits, squirrels and raccoons were here before the houses. They’ve adapted, and they still are here. The forest may be gone, but you still have the maple trees or whatever in your back yard.”
Coffee and his staff worked at showing the kinds of wild animals that make our homes theirs. In the living room, for example, visitors will sit on chairs with paisley silverfish-pattern slipcovers, watching television “interviews” with insects that explain their lives in the house.
In the bathroom, everything will look normal as long as the lights are on. When they are turned off, a black light goes on, showing phosphorescent diagrams around the tub, toilet and washstand, locating where staph and strep bacteria, fungi, mold and mildew lurk.
“The other big story we want to tell with the house is that humans have a far-reaching environmental impact because of the way we live,” said Coffee. “If I flip on a light switch, a piece of coal starts burning somewhere else to provide the energy to make the electricity to light my light. If I turn on a tap, the water is drawn from Lake Michigan. If I turn on a burner on my gas range in the kitchen, the natural gas is pumped all the way from Alaska.”
Many of the other exhibits, too, will explore the impact of human action and behavior on nature. Environmental Central, a $1 million exhibit that will use dozens of computers manned by visitors, will let people take the part of farmers, industrialists, scientists and consumers while examining such issues as how water is used. In another display, visitors will use a 35-foot-long, flowing model of the Chicago River to create locks and dams and learn how to purify water.
In the 1850s, Robert Kennicott, a young Chicago naturalist, and a few of his like-minded friends already were worrying about the harm humans were doing to nature as settlers descended on Illinois. They founded the academy as a place to preserve plant and animal specimens they had been collecting from the Chicago region and the state before it all disappeared in the maw of agricultural and urban development then sweeping across the Midwest.
Kennicott had the drive, adventurous spirit and intellectual gifts that probably would have propelled the academy into a world-class natural history collection, like the Field Museum’s today. Unfortunately, he died in 1866, and the museum’s early collections went up in flames when Chicago burned down in 1871.
It took years to build up the collection again, but by 1893 the academy had the resources and the need to build the place that became its home for the next century: the compact but elegant, neoclassical Matthew Laflin Memorial building on Clark Street and Armitage Avenue.
Though small compared with the Field Museum, the academy nonetheless has never been an insignificant institution. It has always been a rallying place for individuals and groups committed to environmental issues, having a long history as a meeting hall for conservationist groups like the Audubon Society and the Sierra Club.
At the turn of the century, the academy helped establish the new science of ecology, born in the Indiana dunes east of Gary where Henry Cowles did pioneering studies of ecological succession. Cowles, a University of Chicago botanist regarded by many as the father of ecology, also was president of the academy for a time and ran campaigns there to save wilderness areas.
In the 1970s, Steve Packard, now of the Nature Conservancy, started one of the nation’s biggest and most successful environmental restoration projects at the academy, organizing volunteers there to find and repair damaged prairie ecosystems.
Since the rise of the Field Museum, the academy has seen its mission primarily as one to teach Midwestern nature. The old museum’s stunningly realistic dioramas of pristine, pre-settlement Chicago dune, prairie and woodland habitats were long a magnet for school field trips.
“Nature is the easiest way, the most accessible way, to understand science,” said zoologist Paul Heltne, who has headed the academy since 1982. “We believe Midwest nature is one of the best and easiest biosystems to explain.”
Under Heltne, the academy has pioneered the use of personal computers in classrooms to hook into the museum via the Internet. For several years the academy has broadcast live from its own studios interactive programs on the Internet into classrooms in 1,000 Illinois public schools.
The new museum is being wired so that every exhibit is also an Internet studio. Curators will use the exhibits as teaching tools in live broadcasts, able to talk back and forth via the Internet with children sitting in their own classrooms all over the state.
That wouldn’t have been possible in the old Laflin Building. After struggling there for years with badly outdated infrastructure and small, inflexible exhibit spaces, the museum had to expand or risk closing due to obsolescence. In 1987, Heltne asked Walter Netsch, commissioner at the Chicago Park District, on whose land the academy sat, for permission and funding to put an addition on the Laflin Building.
“I thought that would be a mistake,” Netsch recounted. “I didn’t see how they could put up a modern addition that would fit very well with such a traditional building.”
Instead, Netsch proposed giving the Laflin Building to Lincoln Park Zoo, which was about to build new administrative offices in the park. He offered the academy 6.35 acres along North Pond, site of a turn-of-the-century Park District maintenance building known as the Fullerton Shops.
“I always thought it was appalling to use such choice parkland to house trucks,” said Netsch, “and I couldn’t imagine a better museum site.”
The park district provided $10 million of what would become a $30 million tab. Closing that gap has been no easy task in a decade when just about every major cultural institution in the city has launched major fundraising and expansion campaigns.
The city’s big museums often have wealthy board members who also serve on boards of several other cultural institutions. Thus, at fundraising time, the museums find themselves looking to the same individuals and corporations for money. The biggest institutions get the most attention, making fundraising all the harder for medium-sized ones like the academy.
To get attention, Heltne and his staff rely heavily on the academy’s reputation in science education. Besides being a school field-trip mainstay, the academy has long been an important training ground for teachers who want to improve their science-teaching skills. In addition, under Heltne the academy founded the International Center for the Advancement of Science Literacy, an internationally respected research organization.
“We appeal to corporate officers who are concerned about making sure their future workforce is scientifically literate,” said Heltne. “These are people who are concerned very much about the education of children (and) the scientific literacy of our citizens.”
The museum has raised $24.3 million so far, including a $4 million gift from Richard Notebaert, chairman of Ameritech Corp., in honor of his wife, Peggy, who heads the museum’s fundraising committee. In return for the largest single private donation in 141 years, the museum’s formal name will be the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum.
When the academy went looking for an architect for its new building, it chose Ralph Johnson, perhaps best known for his design of the international terminal at O’Hare International Airport. His design philosophy turned out to be a perfect fit for the academy.
“I do very site-specific buildings,” Johnson said. “Rather than fight the site features, you try to exploit them.”
It was Johnson’s idea to make a strong connection between the museum grounds and the indoor exhibitry by using lots of windows. He also installed a rooftop walkway that allows visitors to look at life in the tops of the trees on the grounds.
“The museum is an educational, child-oriented place,” said Johnson. “The whole idea of this building is to walk into an environment and experience it. I loved the old dioramas, and now you can actually walk through them.”
The 6.35-acre setting is meant to be as much a part of the museum as what is inside it. Heltne brought in landscape architect Carol Yetken, who wanted to put interpretive paths through the grounds, shaping the outdoor flora and fauna into a nature lesson.
“The landscape had to work on several levels,” said Yetken, “for scientific and ecological teaching, as a protective habitat for native and migrating wildlife and as something pleasing to look at to the more casual observer.
“As a designer, I try to approach every project in an ecological way. I like to bring nature into my designs.”
Though about 100 trees, most of them dead or near-dead, were removed, Yetken has planted 150 more on the grounds. She is trying to re-create five typical Chicago-area plant communities outside the museum. They include a pond and woodland edge, a prairie, a deep-shaded woods and a ravine community with limestone outcroppings.
Not all of the new museum is devoted to teaching and preaching. The academy also is going to do some pioneering science in an attempt to pull some important local wildlife back from the brink of extinction. It will be an experiment conducted in full view of the public in its showpiece exhibit, the butterfly haven.
Two years ago the academy persuaded Douglas Taron, a research biochemist who had been developing DNA probes for cancer diagnostics for Amoco Corp., to join the Nature Museum staff. He will run the butterfly haven, a place that, for him, will be a way to feed his real passion, conservation biology.
For 18 years Taron fed that passion in his spare time, working as the volunteer state coordinator of the Nature Conservancy’s butterfly monitoring program. His interest was in seeing rare butterflies native to this area repopulating the bits and pieces of surviving prairie in the Chicago region.
Unlike prairie plant communities, which can be nursed back to health after lying dormant for even a century or more, prairie butterflies cannot magically reappear.
“Insects have to complete their life cycles every year,” said Taron. “If that cycle is interrupted, they will vanish from the site.”
Taron and his staff will use the Nature Museum’s 30-foot-high, 40-by-70-foot Butterfly Haven to breed rare native Illinois butterflies, such as the regal fritillary. Then these endangered species will be returned to the native prairie.
“(The regal fritillary’s) caterpillars feed exclusively on a rare species of prairie violets,” Taron said. “There are just a few colonies left in the state, none in the Chicago area, and there are a lot of good prairie habitats here for them. Once we learn how to do this well, we could have a positive impact on that species.”
At any given time, 500 to 750 butterflies will be flying in the haven, Taron said. Visitors will enter the haven through entries that keep a continuous flow of forced air to block the butterflies from leaving.
The haven will grow native plants that the insects eat in their caterpillar stage, then return to as butterflies to lay eggs. Taron’s aim is to get really rare local species, the regal fritillaries among them, to breed in large numbers in the haven.
If restorers can place 5,000 fritillary caterpillars at a time in a wild prairie, chances are good that some will survive weather hazards and predators, such as birds and jumping spiders, to emerge as butterflies. Successes like that would give many butterfly species now all but extinct a new chance at rejoining the parade of mainstream evolutionary life.
Taron’s work would be well understood by academy founder Kennicott. Barely out of his teens in 1856, Kennicott worried about settlers and town-builders too freely killing off wildlife, and published a pamphlet, “Quadrupeds of Illinois.” A plea to farmers, it asked them to curb their appetites for slaughtering wild animals they regarded as pests, especially predators, like foxes:
“Ruled by All-wise laws, every animal fills its appointed place exactly, existing not alone for itself, but forming a necessary part of the vast system of Nature. One class of animal keeps in check certain plants; others prevent the too great increase of these, while those having few enemies are not prolific. Man interferes unwisely, and order is broken. . . . Before waging war on any animal, let us study . . . the consequences which would follow its extermination.”
Restated in a more current idiom and illustrated with state-of-the-art technology, the Nature Museum’s message will be much the same.
