What Fresh Hell is This? Stern vs. Atwood at the Museum of Science and Industry

 No debate.  No real public input.

On Friday, the Chicago Department of Planning and Development went on social media to reveal plans, with a grand total of four - count 'em, four! - cheap-looking renderings that look like they were generated in AI "skimp on the tokens" mode - of the Peter Griffin Museum of Science and Industry's intent to completely redo its main northern entrance.

The design, from Robert A.M. Stern Architects, which gave us all those ham-fisted advertising kiosks masquerading as bus shelters, is intrusive and dispiriting.  The current pair of squat, graceless entrance pavilions at least have the decency not to obscure the view of the great stair and grand classical facade - they're on either side of it.  The Stern rehab envisages a massive berm all along the driveway, centered with an even more massive new glass entrance that seems to stretch all the way to the grand stair itself, which is cut in two, with a new entrance carved into the middle.

A key takeaway is that the four renderings - deliberately? - are inadequate to providing a full and accurate picture of the scope, character, and details of the construction.  What appears to be the case is that visitors would now enter a big glass barn, only to be funneled into another big barn, a/k/a the current great entry hall for ticketing, where it seems (again, unclear in the rendering) it's only bit of character - those shiny-thing giant columns - may be replaced by what can only be described as dying-shopping-mall whitewall.

Also unclear is the actual circulation.  The rendering shows the new entry promenade leading directly at street level to that new entrance cut into the stairs, but the ticketing hall is below street level.  How do visitors get down there?  Same as now?  Something different? The renderings offer no clue, but the design of that transition is as important as anything else.

You can see how this proposal addresses a real problem.  For its first half-century, when admission was free, the grand entrance was the grand entrance.   You climbed up the great staircase (little consideration for disabled access in those days), hopefully took a glance back at the great view of the grand buildings of Hyde Park across the street, and passed through the great bronze doors into Alfred P. Shaw's stunning Art Deco stairway entrance, leading directly to ticketing and the museum's great central hall.  

When the unsightly, sprawling front surface parking and entrance hall were moved underground in the late 1990s, the entrance from the driveway became those ugly twin entrance pavilions, which lead to a series of not especially graceful escalators, stairways and elevators with a POMO vibe.  The redesign looks to streamline that procession, a laudable goal.  The execution is another story.

This ain't no I.M. Pei Louvre Pyramid, where his radical structure is given room to breath in the middle of a plaza, allowing the classical facades around it to survive unscathed. 

By Hteink.min - commons:File:Louvre Pyramid.jpg, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=38292385

This is a self-aggrandizing obstruction, deliberately upstaging and deprecating the classic entrance facade that has been a Chicago landmark all the way back to the days of the 1893 Columbian Exposition.  If it has really become an anachronistic obstacle, tear it down and create something spectacular truly worthy of Chicago's great architectural tradition; we'll still have classicism in the soon-to-be restored south portico.  Just be honest about it.  Don't try to sneak it in the back door with a mediocre, dominance-seeking redesign of the front door.

And that's what may be most dispiriting about this whole thing - it smacks of trying to pull a fast one, with renderings released only after the Landmarks Commission Permit Review committee gave the project is rubber stamp.  Did they know they were dealing with a turkey, but realize it's the norm that the powerful usually get a free pass?

It's too big.  It's too stupid.  It's too arrogant.  Respect Charles Atwood's original architectural vision. Cut it back to a truly complementary glass entry pavilion stretching from driveway to grand stair that's low and only as wide as the pathway to the staircase. Let the spectacle begin on the inside.  "Less is More" + "First, do no harm" - remember?

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Holiday Excursion: Architecture Seen and Inhabited at Museum of Science and Industry and its anniversary show, 80 at 80, ripe for Dali-ance

A couple of weeks ago we are out at the Museum of Science Industry, whose great dome rises in the Hyde Park skyline alongside the towers of the University of Chicago.  It's the last great structure surviving from the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition, designed by Charles Atwood for Daniel Burnham in the classical revival style , complete with Erechtheion caryatids . . .

. . . that Louis Sullivan bitterly predicted would set back the course of American architecture half a century.  The summer after the exposition's closing, a great fire swept through the site and destroyed most of the buildings, but unlike those structures, whose timeless elegance came not from stone but sprayed concrete, Atwood's palace was built of sterner stuff, including a brick substructure to protect the priceless art treasures that it had displayed.

The building became the temporary home for the Field Museum of Natural History, but after the Field moved to its own home in 1920,  Atwood's structure was left to rot, until Sears Executive Julius Rosenwald spearheaded the effort to turn it into the Museum of Science of Industry.

On June 19th, the MSI celebrated the 80th anniversary of its opening with a birthday party and opening of a new exhibit, 80 at 80, that reaches into the storerooms to give a timeline of mothballed items, many once quite popular, another moment in the sun.  The newest item of the 80, a Google Glass, was modeled by MSI President David Mosena before being put the display.

The party included the Jesse White Tumblers, a stroboscopic cake, and a big finale that included a rapid-fire sequence of science experiments . . .

. . . of which an unexpected highlight was an errant spark burning a nearby 18-foot-high plasticine giraffe to the ground.*

Model maker extraordinaire Adam Reed Tucker was in attendance . . .

. . .  with his LEGO version of the MSI . . .

Among the architecture-related items in 80 at 80 are a model for the 1933 Century of Progress exhibition . . .

. . . Edwin Howland  Blashfield's painting of the Palace of Fine arts (a gift from Daniel Burnham, Jr. . . .

. . . Latham Tyler Jensen's striking rendering for a 1959 Outboard Marine exhibit . . .

 . . . and, best of all,  a Salvador Dali lithograph of the museum that demonstrates how much the art of architecture rendering would be improved if there were only more large nudes . . .

Still in mothballs, unfortunately, is the museum's original elegant art deco entrance . . .

. . . and its great bronze doors with fourteen reliefs illustrating elements of science.

Fifteen years ago, visitors began to be redirected to the current subterranean shopping mall barn where they now line up in queues to to contemplate ticket options only slightly less complex than those for buying a car, and, with top prices of $35.00 for adults and $25.00 for kids, feeling nearly as expensive.

What endures at the MSI, even in our increasingly digitized age, is the sheer visceral rush of encountering tons of different cool stuff, often animated in increasingly sophisticated and instructive ways, filling to the brim the spacious, acoustically buzzy halls opening off the rounded atrium beneath the great dome.

And after all this, it was comforting to still find, just as I remembered from my childhood, the 3-D printers in the basement . . .

Legal Disclaimer:  portions of this article indicated by an ‘*’ may have been enhanced for dramatic effect.

The Building Louis Loathed

click images for larger view

The architect did not give the building any rest, but as to the remainder of the structure -- it seems an ill-compounded salad, with a rather rancid, New-Yorky flavor.
       Kindergarten Chats, Louis H. Sullivan