The raging debate over putting the Chicago Children’s Museum in Grant Park has literally descended to a new low, one which reveals how fundamentally misconceived the plan is.
The plan not only would undermine more than a century of efforts to keep this singular park free and clear of buildings. It also threatens to mar the experience of the very constituency the museum is designed to serve — children.
I’m talking about a dubious political compromise floated Tuesday, in which a reporter at City Hall suggested the museum could be built totally underground. Ald. Brendan Reilly (42nd) pledged to consider the idea, and Chicago Planning and Development Commissioner Arnold Randall said that it might be a solution to the battle between Reilly, who opposes placing the museum in Grant Park, and Mayor Richard M. Daley, who just as emphatically wants it there.
An underground children’s museum is a terrible idea because it would repeat, at large scale, what parents invariably do with their kids when it’s play time: Dispatch them to the basement.
In the basement, there is precious little natural light. In the basement, there are few, if any, views. The basement may be fun, a break from the formality of the rest of the house, but the notion of putting a museum in a park — and then burying it completely so it would have no views of the park — is to venture into the architecture of the absurd.
This is not what children need. As the Chicago designers Sharon and Peter Exley write in their new book, “Design for Kids,” architecture can stimulate or suppress, generate joy or fear, encourage or discourage creativity. But an underground museum would be a deadly dull space, largely bereft of the shifting natural light and views that animate the interior of architect Larry Booth’s fine new Kohl Children’s Museum in Glenview.
Reilly himself said as much Tuesday, wondering whether the museum would “want all of their programming to essentially be in a cave.”
The underground museum trial-balloon is useful only because it represents the logical extreme of the museum’s desperate attempts to comply with four landmark court decisions, made around the turn of the last century in response to lawsuits filed by Chicago businessman A. Montgomery Ward. The decisions affirmed the principal that Grant Park should remain “Forever Open, Clear and Free of any Buildings, or other Obstruction Whatever.”
The museum’s plans, as shaped by Chicago architects Ron Krueck and Mark Sexton, increasingly resemble an iceberg shrinking amid the short-lived heat of the Arctic summer. As the architects come to grips with the Ward decisions, the aboveground portion of their three-level, 100,000-square-foot building keeps getting smaller and smaller.
Once more than two stories high and nearly as long as a football field, the visible part of the museum has melted down to a 20-foot-high, glass-sheathed entry pavilion along Upper Randolph Street and four skylights, no more than 16 feet high, that would draw light into the museum’s subterranean exhibition spaces. They resemble cute little ice cubes floating in a sea of grass.
Krueck and Sexton are among Chicago’s most talented architects, but they are being made to walk an impossible tightrope, balancing between the legal imperative of the Ward decisions and the design imperative to provide vibrant, light-filled spaces where kids can paint on easels, crank water wheels and climb walls. The more they comply with the one, the more they violate the other.
True, their design would use the skylights, a light shaft and an inner courtyard to draw light into portions of the museum and provide park views. Yet even they acknowledge that dropping the building farther into the ground has cut the amount of interior spaces with park views by roughly two-thirds while reducing the amount of naturally lighted interiors by about one-third. A fully underground museum would make these numbers — and the quality of the museum experience — even worse.
Think of room after room with track lights. That’s hardly progress over the museum’s current home at Navy Pier, where the visitor can at least look out over Lake Michigan or gaze at the Chicago skyline. Is burying a museum beneath a park what we want at a time when, as Richard Louv argues in his book “Last Child in the Woods,” the wired generation of kids is increasingly disconnected from the outdoors?
In an earlier assessment of the Children’s Museum’s plan, I opposed the proposal on the grounds that it would undermine a Grant Park that should be “forever open, clear and free,” but left the door open for an improved design that might satisfy both the museum’s needs and the Ward decisions.
But the more I look at the plan through the lens of form and function, the more it becomes apparent that the chosen site will benefit neither Grant Park nor the children who are the museum’s reason for being.
Daley should abandon this irresolvable plan and push the museum to look at alternatives, from anchoring a rejuvenated Navy Pier to establishing a beachhead in little-used Burnham Park, where it could form a new link in the chain of lakefront museums between the Museum Campus and the Museum of Science and Industry.
The lakefront and the children deserve better than a political compromise that is principally designed not to produce inspiring architecture, but to let the powerful mayor save face.
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bkamin@tribune.com
