Kamin Joins the Chorus: CCM - Stop Hiding Your Museum!

Blair gets it. Months after we began talking about how the Chicago Children's Museum is deliberately withholding all but the most deceptive images of the large structure they want to muscle into Grant Park, the Chicago Tribune's Pulitzer-Prize winning architecture critic Blair Kamin blasted the museum and its architects, Krueck and Sexton, for withholding all but the most abstracted images on the proposed structure from the public.

In a demonstration of just how much K&S has allowed itself to be co-opted by the museum's cynicism, project manager Tom Jacobs posted a comment to Kamin's article, which reads:

The Chicago Tribune has been in possession of many presentation plans, sections, and elevations for the proposed Children’s Museum since April 4, 2008 including several views of the sculptural glass entrance and skylights. The choice of illustrations that tell an incomplete and one-sided architectural story was made solely by the Tribune. We would like to encourage all media to contribute to fair, complete and accurate reporting to facilitate the needed debate.

Yeah, right. In fact Kamin posted 12 of the 14 images on his blog, and you can see them all here. (Missing were - still another! - meaningless cross-section, and a photograph of the current garage entrance, for which we include our own photograph below.)
And what exactly are these images Jacobs would have you believe provide you the real story? Let's start at the beginning, with the first image, of the current Daley Bicentennial Plaza, which we've cribbed from Blair's Skyline blog:
Wow, how objective. Taken in what looks to be the dead of winter, all parched brown earth. The desert in Lawrence of Arabia was more inviting.

Now here's what Daley Bi really looks like, in a similar, if less wide angle shot, taken this past Sunday.
The next two images are birds-eye view of about six square blocks around the museum drawn from about half a mile up. Four is a cutaway drawn from about two blocks away. The next four are floor plans. The last four are cutaways. In three of them the museum - all levels - takes up about a sixth of the vertical space of the rendering; about two-thirds is given over to empty sky. Every one of these drawings deliberately seeks to obscure the scale of Krueck and Sexton's proposed buildings both to the existing park and to the human form.

And I will repeat a point that Kamin does not mention. There have been no images released - as in zero, none - of what the interiors of the 100,000 square foot museum will be like. This would be unacceptable for any project of this size, but for a proposal for a subterranean design to be occupied by children, to be built on public ground, and its operations subsidized by taxpayer funds, it is unconscionable.

And what is most disconcerting is how many sterling reputations are being voluntarily trashed in service of the Museum's desperate campaign to force its way into the Park. A great Chicago family of philanthropists, the Pritzkers, have descended into the gutter to smear opponents of Gigi Pritzker's pet project as racist. There's some solace, I suppose, in the fact I can no longer find on the Krueck and Sexton website a "press section" on the CCM project that consisted in its entirety of two news articles playing up that race-baiting theme, but its supremely depressing that Tom Jacobs has decided to transform himself from a talented architect to a snake-oil salesman. When he says that the 14 images released to Tribune give a true picture of the CCM design, he knows he's lying, and when he concludes with, "We would like to encourage all media to contribute to fair, complete and accurate reporting to facilitate the needed debate," he knows he's doing everything in his power to ensure exactly the opposite.