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.
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| 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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