Two years after the Museum Campus brought together Chicago’s three natural science museums on a lakefront greensward uninterrupted by high-speed expressway traffic, it is A) hugely popular, B) a more attractive landscape than when it opened, and C) still a work in progress, one that someday could become a traffic-snarled mess that crams too many people and activities into too little space.
Shaping a city is typically a matter of striking a balance between competing priorities–cars versus people on foot, privately owned buildings versus public space. And so it is just east of Lake Shore Drive, where the Adler Planetarium finished a major expansion last year, the Field Museum and the Shedd Aquarium have big additions of their own in the works, and the Chicago Bears want to renovate Soldier Field, which sits just south of the campus.
What will all this activity add up to? More fun or more hassles? A whole that is more–or less–than the sum of its parts?
It’s too early to offer any definitive answer. But judging by the latest stadium renovation plan, this much is certain: The campus may be boffo urban design–what other city would actually move a highway to create a shoreline park?–yet it still gets low marks for accessibility by car and for parking. The very fact that the Bears’ plan tries to remedy these problems underscores that the campus, while still an extraordinary urban planning achievement, is anything but a finished masterpiece.
The physical groundwork for the campus was laid in 1995 and 1996 when city and state transportation planners, following the grand plan of the San Francisco urban designer Lawrence Halprin, rebuilt the northbound lanes of Lake Shore Drive west of Soldier Field. It took another year and a half to turn the Drive’s old northbound lanes into parkland and bike paths, and for the Chicago firm of Teng & Associates to create a campus-like space uniting the Field, the Shedd and the Adler. In all, the $110 million roadway relocation project added 36 acres of usable parkland to the lakefront.
Since then, Museum Campus attendance has soared, with people attracted not only by the new public space but also by blockbuster exhibitions like “Sue,” the famed T. Rex, at the Field. This year, total attendance for the three museums is expected to reach 4.5 million, a gain of more than 10 percent over 1998, according to Fay Levin, the Field’s vice president of external affairs. With thousands of people coming solely to enjoy the new parkland on the campus, it seems fair to estimate that the total campus attendance easily exceeds 5 million a year. That means the campus is approaching the popularity of Navy Pier, which draws 7.75 million annually.
But in contrast to Navy Pier, which is part shopping mall and part carnival midway, the Museum Campus has tried to combine mass with class. Certainly, its high aspirations are reflected in the grandeur of its buildings and the formal landscape between them. Yet when the campus was dedicated in 1998, much of that landscape was strikingly unfinished and unwelcoming.
The area in front of the Field’s glistening marble facade, for example, looked like a giant pool table, so absent were the trees and shrubs that should have been present but weren’t because the museum wanted to keep the area open for a road leading to it. Meanwhile, a tiered “Great Lawn” that cascaded from the Field toward Lake Michigan resembled a hill with a green carpet of Astroturf stretched across it. The whole thing looked inappropriately barren–green space, to be sure, but not exactly inviting green space.
Well, it is much more inviting today, and credit for that goes to Teng’s landscape designer, Josephine Bellalta, who has filled in the once-blank area in front of the Field with formal, rectangle-shaped groupings of lindens, yews and groundcover. True, as I’ve noted in the past, the lindens block views of the Field’s grand classical facade from certain spots. But that fault is far outweighed by the gardens themselves, which are lined by elegant, low-slung classical fences. The gardens perfectly fill in the gap in scale between the massive museum and the comparatively tiny pedestrian. Where there was once a wide-open, intimidating plain, there is now a strong but not overwhelming sense of enclosure. Shade protects visitors from the sun. Leaves shield them from the wind. Breaks in the fences allow people to enter the gardens, where they picnic or just sit.
Even better, the gardens provide just the right kind of backdrop–traditional and textured–for the simple, abstract form of the Great Lawn, which is a modern version of the landscape tiers that announce the importance of such Chicago landmarks as Buckingham Fountain. The end result is that the landscape in front of the Field is both visually more enticing and more usable. It works nicely in sync with a comparably designed sequence of gardens that leads to the front door of the temple-like Shedd. The entire ensemble speaks to the continuing power of traditional city planning to lend urban areas coherence and civility.
If only such coherence had been achieved on the rest of the Museum Campus. But the truth is, it hasn’t been–at least not yet.
There is still an ugly stretch of concrete on Solidarity Drive in front of the Adler Planetarium, marring the beautifully executed restoration of the Art Deco landmark, with its rainbow granite facade and jewel-like bronze doors, by Lohan Associates of Chicago. Fortunately, according to the museum’s president, Paul Knappenberger, the Adler is working with the Chicago Park District to fix the area, with new plantings due to be in place by spring, 2001.
Also hanging in the balance is the swath of grass between the Shedd and the Field where the Drive’s northbound lanes used to run.
Two years ago, that grass was just as barren as the Field flatlands, a lost opportunity to give the campus a heart. Now, at least, it has a food concession and restroom pavilion by Teng’s Tom Hoepf, providing a much-needed convenience for visitors. But the pavilion’s architecture is an unpersuasive compromise between modernism and classicism, with tacked-on, sea-themed decoration. Worse, the pavilion seems to have been plopped down on a concrete pad with little regard for creating a sense of place around it.
Even with such faults, the campus remains a boon for the pedestrian and a rejection of the mid-20th Century mindset that turned over precious shoreline space to cars, expressways and parking lots. It’s easy and pleasant to reach the campus on foot from Grant Park, for example, through an especially wide, light-filled underpass that shoots below Lake Shore Drive. Yet approaching the campus by car–which is how the vast majority of people reach it–is far more difficult.
The trouble begins at the tightly configured intersection of Lake Shore Drive; McFetridge Drive, the east-west road that leads into the campus, and Columbus Drive, a north-south road that lead into Grant Park. Two years ago, this interchange was viewed as a long-overdue shift from the days of massive expressway cloverleaves that gobbled up land around them. But now, that very diminutiveness seems a liability.
So closely spaced are the poured-in-place concrete walls of this interchange, and so heavy are the loads of traffic, that traffic light poles are routinely knocked down by big yellow school buses, city transportation planners say.
And the problems are not just functional, but formal. For while the tightly spaced interchange leads to three imposing museums, it is anything but impressive itself. “It’s like going to the Vatican and finding there’s a tight little doorway to it,” says John MacManus, the Chicago urban designer who was Teng’s lead designer for the Museum Campus.
To correct these faults, Chicago transportation planners have floated the idea of making traffic flow more smoothly by building an underpass that would speed northbound Lake Shore Drive traffic below McFetridge. Yet that move, which would cost up to $50 million, has been labeled a budget-buster for the Bears deal. Instead, the Bears and their architects–Wood and Zapata of Boston and Lohan Associates–are reportedly suggesting an additional entrance to the campus, which would use an existing interchange at 18th Street and the Drive.
In addition, according to people who have been shown the plans, the architects are calling for a four-lane road that would extend from 18th Street to McFetridge. They also propose demolishing the Chicago Park District headquarters building north of Soldier Field and replacing it with a 2,500-space underground garage, which would result in a net gain of 1,300 spaces after a longtime eyesore–the surface lots east of Soldier Field–are turned into parkland.
The new garage would correct a major failing of the campus: On busy summer days, visitors now have to park as much as a mile away from the museums–leaving their cars all the way down by McCormick Place, then waiting for trolleys to ferry them to their destination.
The need for better access from Lake Shore Drive and more close-in parking is all the more pressing because the Shedd and the Field are planning major expansions.
The Shedd, which this spring opened the handsome, light-filled “Amazon Rising” exhibition by Marc L’Italien of the Chicago office of San Francisco-based EHDD and Ralph Johnson of Perkins & Will of Chicago, is readying an even bigger attraction: the $35 million Philippines exhibit, an underground attraction that will feature a huge shark tank and other tanks that allow fish to swim over visitors’ head. To carve out space for the addition, which was designed by the same firms that did “Amazon Rising,” the museum plans to move its existing south wall roughly 100 to 150 feet to the south and to construct a terrace atop it.
“We call it our stealth expansion,” says Paul Bluestone, the Shedd’s vice president of planning and design, about the project, for which ground has been broken and completion is due in 2002.
Also in the stealth expansion business, the Field is planning an expansion of underground storage areas for its anthropology and zoology collections, which house oversized items like boats, pagodas and totem poles. To accomplish this $50 million project, the museum plans to extend its southern terraces by roughly 60 feet. The move, which still requires approval from the Chicago Plan Commission and other bodies, will maintain the symmetrical look of the museum’s southern front, with the expanded terraces to be used for programs or exhibits. It will transform areas now used for storage into exhibition space.
All this may be well and good for the individual museums, but the real issue is how the changes will work for the campus–and the lakefront–as a whole.
Will the museum expansions draw more traffic than the campus can handle? Will their private needs outweigh the campus’ crowing glory–its public space? And what of Soldier Field, which already swamps the campus with traffic when the Bears play?
Will the stadium do even more harm if it hosts scores of events that will help cover the costs of renovation? What is the benefit of new green space around the stadium if it is marooned amid parking lots and traffic-choked roads? Why build a new road to make it easier for people in cars to get to the museums if that same road will make it harder for people on foot to reach the lakefront?
The point is, the Museum Campus and the area around it have to be planned as a whole, not as a series of isolated pieces.
Before it’s too late, the museums, the Bears and city planners would do well to heed these words from the naturalist John Muir, which are flashed on the walls as part of an exhibition in the Shedd’s rotunda. For just as the parts of an ecosystem are invariably interrelated, so it is on the lakefront, where one thing inevitably effects another.
“When we try to pick out anything by itself,” Muir said, “we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.”
