As an exercise in legal gamesmanship, the latest design for the Chicago Children’s Museum’s proposed move to Grant Park is fiendishly clever. As an essay in the art of architecture and city planning, it leaves key questions unanswered and thus fails to address the biggest issue of all: Why here? Will putting the museum on the controversial lakefront site lead to a sunken, dimly lit structure that winds up with the nickname “the Children’s Mausoleum”?
The museum, which on Friday filed a revamped version of its proposal to the Chicago Department of Planning, has in the last few months made public so many designs, containing so little easy-to-grasp information, that the public is to be forgiven if it feels as though its collective head is spinning.
Perhaps this is a way to wear down the opposition, though the architects, the Chicago firm of Krueck & Sexton, insist that all the to and fro has produced the best design yet.
Certainly, we are looking at something different: A proposal that is less a conventional building than a kind of earth sculpture, burrowing into the ground like the earnest, berm-covered houses built in response to the oil price shocks of the 1970s.
“It announces itself as a whisper rather than a shout,” says one of the firm’s partners, Mark Sexton.
Outdoor zig-zagging ramps would lead from upper Randolph Street to the museum’s entrance, 16 feet below at park level. South-facing windows built into the park’s new slope replace the four aboveground skylights, each 16 feet tall, which would have brought natural light into the museum’s subterranean spaces.
The proposed entry pavilion along upper Randolph, still about 20 feet high, is now a quarter of its previous size (about 800 square feet) and has been moved to the sidewalk, just outside Grant Park’s borders. Presumably, that also puts it outside the reach of the historic Montgomery Ward court decisions, which upheld the mandate that the park remain free of buildings.
The architects portray the plan as an inspired attempt to comply with the Ward rulings. And indeed, the proposal makes some improvements, such as eliminating a pitlike sunken courtyard that only would have been available to ticketed museum-goers and replacing it with sloping, aboveground terraces that would be serve as light wells and be open to the public.
Punched openings between floors also raise the prospect that Krueck & Sexton could create the kind of spatial excitement that distinguishes their Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies.
Still, the design also can be understood as a form of calculated subtraction, slyly editing out features that appeared to violate the Ward court rulings. “Gotcha!” it seems to say to opponents.
That isn’t enough. The plan still does not adequately address the experience of the most important client on this project: Not Mayor Richard Daley, who is the most fervent booster of the museum’s plans, but the child for whom the museum is supposedly being built.
What would it be like for that child — a 3-year-old kid in a stroller, say — to be in a building that drops as far as 48 feet below street level, down where there is now a depressing, concrete-walled parking garage? Would it be inspiring or dreary? Uplifting or scary? How much daylight would get in? What would the views to the outside be like?
The architects have been scrambling so fast to change their plan that they don’t have the computer fly-throughs and other material that will let the public and public officials reach a carefully considered judgment. We can’t be expected to rely on their intuition. We need hard information.
They should provide it — and well before the Chicago Plan Commission takes up the proposal May 15, with the City Council expected to follow in June. The big question remains whether this is a good marriage: Is the museum good for Grant Park? Is Grant Park good for the museum?
For now at least, the design, not without promise, still doesn’t overcome the widely held view that the museum set itself an impossible task by picking the wrong site.
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bkamin@tribune.com
