FIELD MUSEUM. A Look Inside

The first impression on entering Stanley Field Hall is a sense of great public space: simple forms and surfaces define the heart of the Museum. It is an enormous skylit room, lined with arches and terminated on the South by an apse. Exhibition spaces are accessible to the East and West. A simple solution to the difficult conceptual problem of organizing a Great Museum.

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Above: Stanley Field Hall. Space enough for the largest dinosaur.

Below: The Skylight. A simple grid pattern with ornament and theme.

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Above: The Apse, flanked with Henry Hering's Allegorical Figures

Below: Arches line the Hall and define entry points to the Exhibitions.

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All nice and simple. Right?

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FIELD MUSEUM. A Few Quiet Surprises

It is easy to look at the Field Museum and become taken with THE BIG STUFF: axis, plinth, symmetry, size, columns (Ionic), and caryatids. But there is a secondary level of exterior detail, that once encountered, is not forgotten. Around the corner from the Porch of the Maidens a simple row of windows takes on a quiet, almost residential scale. Window frames are not simple coves or ogees, they are covered with considered ornament. Windows near the north and south porticos are small, elegant, deeply inset, finely divided.

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It is apparent that this is the work of an accomplished designer, who has matured with his own portfolio. Think of Peirce Anderson's career to date. The masterplan of Manila with Daniel Burnham. Marshall Field and Company. Union Station in Chicago. And Washington DC. (Not to mention the Post Office). He is about to start the Equitable Building in New York. And the great banking rooms in Chicago. He is 41 years old as construction begins on the Field. I can't help but admit, I'm a little jealous. And still, there was time to consider rams heads on the flagpole.

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FIELD MUSEUM. and Style

Japanese Concrete Brutalism, Mid-Century Modern Revival, Arts and Crafts Contextualism, Second Chicago School. Richard Meier in white. Frank Gehry in stainless. Styles, all, to be promoted, defended or destroyed. But for Peirce Anderson, designer of the Field Museum, the only style to be considered was 3rd Century Rome. And he was a master of that style, producing perfectly detailed architraves, plinths, column capitals, and acroterion. Forget the interior basilica form for a minute, the elevated site, its axis and size -- to consider exterior details. The images speak for themselves.

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Above: The South Stair

Below: The West Wing

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Above: The Front Door
Below: Detail

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Above: Acroterion
Below: Caryatid









A perfect place, after all, for mummies and dinosaurs. Additional photos are posted at CHICAGO Sculpture in the Loop. See Links at left.

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FIELD MUSEUM. Site. Symmetry. Scale. Size.

Early 20th Century Architecture in Chicago is remarkable for its contrasts. Louis Sullivan completed the People's Bank (1911) in Cedar Rapids.(http://www.flickr.com/photos/repowers/118633239/in/photostream) Frank Lloyd Wright completed the Midway Gardens south of MIdway Plaisance on Cottage Grove Avenue in Chicago (1913).(http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/3563.html) And construction began on Peirce Anderson's design for the Field Museum (1911). All worked with artists on their commissions: Wright with Alphonso Iannelli, Sullivan with Louis J. Millett and Allen Philbrick, and Anderson with Henry Hering. However similar in team approach, all worked with decidedly different architectural vocabularies. The Field Museum was at the time, "modern" and followed the then broadly accepted Classical Style inspired by the World's Fair that "set architecture back by fifty years."

Interesting to speculate what might we have had if the commissions had been switched.

It is impossible not to compare the Field Museum with the Museum of Science and Industry (Columbian Exposition Palace of Fine Arts). Both are "Classic" and both by urban planning twists of fate are now entered through "the back door." Both were designed by architects who had worked for Daniel Burnham. Both have caryatids (right here on the Lake). But here the comparison stops. The Museum of Science and Industry is of almost Victorian complexity. The Field Museum is planned and sized for the Twentieth Century.

The Field Museum and the Chicago Board of Trade share (and gain importance from) their comparable axial relationships with in the City. The Board of Trade (a Holabird and Root project) is at the terminus of LaSalle Street and holds an (almost) centerline position flanked and enhanced by the symmetries of Anderson's Federal Reserve and the Continental Bank. (This will be the subject of a later post). The Field Museum is the visual terminus of Lake Shore Drive and gains strength from its (imperfect) geometric relationship to Holabird and Roche's Soldier Field. The Field Museum, however, maintains presence by its size and symmetry alone. The image below was taken from the Center of Lake Shore Drive at Balbo. Balancing on one foot. Imagining what might have happened if William Holabird and Ernest Graham had done just a little better with their co-ordination.

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And having said all that, so to speak, at the end of the day, it is this remarkable view that makes me think about Chicago whenever I am someplace else.

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ON VACATION.Digital Withrdawal

I'll be on vacation thru April 8. And as I reach to TURN OFF THE COMPUTER, I realize I'm a little nervous to cut the cord. (I'll get over it, certainly.)

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Before leaving I'd like to take a moment to refer you all to the Links at the left. They are respected online collegues. Each is to be valued for a different reason. ARCHINECT, example, succeeds with his ambitions (how many can say that?): to make architects "more connected and more open-minded....." BLAIR KAMIN presents Architecture with the full resources of the Chicago Tribune -- and Architecture needs that three column blog.. ARCHITECTURE PLUS is self-deprecating, intelligent, useful, and on occasion produces prose so good that it wouldn't matter what the subject might be.

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I tend to be Regionalist. A DAILY DOSE tends to be broader, more engaged, with a fuller page. I lean to Architecture as Art. CHICAGO ARCHITECTURE BLOG tends to be more mercantile. I focus on detail. CHICAGO ARCHITECTURE AND CITYSCAPE can be wide-ranging and inclusive. I was ready for a mindless rail at Renzo Piano's use of scale to diminish the Sullivan Arch. HELLO BEAUTIFUL, with calmer intelligence, found Piano's homage to Sullivan in the Oriel window. I am practical to a fault. INTO THE LOOP is capable of imagining a Venusian Bubble Machine.....and blogging the most stunning visual accompaniment ever to Smetana's Die Moldau. (DO NOT MISS THE POST "Architectural Porn".) ( And follow links to the Shah Mosque in Isphahan for another stunning four minutes.)

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My photography is precise. Lee Bey's Pullman in snow is haunting. I am entirely involved in the "Built Environment". AWFUL AND WONDERFUL remembers that there are other patterns, perhaps more important. Take time for each. Surely, each have all made me a better professional and a better person. And I look forward to knowing more.

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See you in a week.