The last time the Griffin Museum of Science and Industry’s south entry was opened to the public, radio hadn’t yet been invented. Or aspirin.
Half of all U.S. homes were also still being lit by natural gas, and the first motion picture camera wouldn’t get patented for another five years.
Indeed, as far as anyone can tell, the last patrons to routinely pass through the colonnaded, bronze-doored entrance likely arrived by gondola — sailing across Jackson Park’s Columbia Basin, right up to what was then the front doors of the Palace of Fine Arts at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition.
But that’ll start to change come winter when the museum breaks ground on a $22 million project that will include reopening the 133-year-old edifice’s south entry and adding an indoor cafe with seating on a renovated outdoor terrace.
“That is the original entrance,” Griffin Museum of Science and Industry CEO Chevy Humphrey said. “We want to celebrate that history, but we also want to show how we’re modernizing [and bringing] it back to its original intent of welcoming visitors on the south side of our building.”
The redo, which is expected to be done in 2027, would give the museum an active and ADA-accessible entrance. And the new terrace — overlooking picturesque Jackson Park, the basin and Wooded Isle, with its famed Osaka Garden — holds the promise of offering one of the best views of the city.
“It is going to be exquisite,” Humphrey said. “And it’s going to be extraordinary.”
New York City architecture firm RAMSA, formerly Robert A.M. Stern Architects, is handling the South Portico redesign.
“The goal was to create this opportunity to really capture all the visitors and people traveling along the southern edge of the museum,” RAMSA Associate Partner Caitlin Getman said. “It was to open the doors back up, to create public amenities like restrooms, event spaces for the museum and the community [and] an outdoor terrace and cafe.”
‘Very light touch’
Designed by Charles Atwood, the building was built for the 1893 World’s Fair. Most of the fair’s buildings — beautiful as they were — were temporary structures made of a plaster-like material.
But the Palace of Fine Arts contained works sent to the fair from across the world and was built with a brick substrate, making it a more permanent and fire-resistant building.
After the fair, the building was briefly home to what is now the Field Museum. The Field built its own building at 1400 S. Lake Shore Drive in 1921, and the old Jackson Park palace fell into ruin.
By 1926, Sears, Roebuck and Co. President Julius Rosenwald took up the call and invested $5 million to turn the building into the Museum of Science and Industry.
The neo-classical, limestone-clad museum with Art Moderne interiors designed by Alfred P. Shaw, opened in 1933.
“I believe when it became the museum in 1933, [the south entrance] was no longer the primary the entrance,” Getman said. “[The building] had shifted its focus to the North Portico.”
It made sense. The north entrance is easier to access by car, and there’s enough room for bus traffic.
Humphrey, who became the museum’s president and CEO in 2020, said she started opening the old main entrance doors so visitors could see the cherry blossoms bloom in Jackson Park.
“But we found that it was very hard on visitors that had disabilities,” she said. “So we don’t open them very often. And the stairs … are in heavy need of repair.”
The museum hired RAMSA to create new admission-free spaces on all sides of the building “for everyone to convene,” Humphrey said.
The South Portico is the first of the projects, she said. The Richard H. Driehaus Foundation kicked in $10 million toward the cost.
Visitors will be able to enter the museum through a new set of on-grade entry doors that lead to a lobby and possibly exhibition space, Getman said.
A lobby elevator will lead up to the museum’s portico level and main cafe. Exterior steps will be restored.
And a glass floor-to-ceiling exterior curtain wall will enclose the loggia between the entry’s four massive columns and the building’s bronze doors.
Getman said the aim is to design the elements so they visually match the old. The museum is one of 2,600 National Historic Landmarks, putting it in the same rarefied company as Jefferson’s Monticello. It’s also a protected city landmark.
The work “allows there to be a very light touch on the historic landmark,” Getman said.
“I think it’s a great addition to the museum, and I can’t wait to see how they realize it and [the space] plan,” Chicago Architecture Center CEO Eleanor Gorski said. “It seems like a very sensitive undertaking.”
Opening the south entry also puts the museum in dialogue with the nearby Obama Presidential Center.
“On the South Side, we will have a museum campus that rivals the one downtown,” Obama Foundation CEO Valerie Jarrett said.
As part of her long-term plans, Humphrey said she’s considering making general admission free — returning to a practice that ended in the early 1990s.
“As Daniel Burnham said, ‘Make no little plans,'” she said. “[This is] one of our big goals, and we’re going to try our best to reach it. It may take us a decade to do, but we have a focus and we’re trying to figure out how we do this.”