The City And Theatre

I chose The Museum of Science and Industry (originally the Palace of Fine Arts) as the building to use to discuss “the city as theater”. Historical references to The Columbian Exposition are everywhere in Chicago and while the Museum harkens back to that time, it also provides modern day museum experiences as the largest science center in the Western Hemisphere.  It is the only building that remains on the site of the original fairgrounds (a second building survives but was moved) and in fact, it stands where it always has, at the north end of the North Pond. I hope to recreate the theatre of the fair and its Palace of Fine Arts and end with a discussion of today’s Jackson Park and the Museum of Science and Industry which has also become the modern-day, cultural “Gateway to the South Side of Chicago”. (1)

The 1893 World Columbian Exposition, Chicago, IL

President Benjamin Harrison signed the act that designated Chicago as the site of the exposition over NYC, St. Louis, and Washington DC. This came a short 60 years after Chicago was founded as a city and 22 years after the Chicago fire. (2)  The stated purpose of the exposition was to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Columbus’ discovery of the New World (one year late) but those involved accepted the challenge to boost America’s reputation by designing a larger, grander fair than the Paris exposition, and felt the pressure to present Chicago to the world. The design team succeeded. The Eiffel Tower of Paris met the Ferris Wheel of Chicago. By the time it closed six months later, Chicago was on the map as a world class city “rising from the ashes”. Gatekeepers recorded 27.5 million visits while the country’s total population was 6.5 million people. On its best day, the fair drew more than 700,000 visitors. In the end, the fair did more than simply stoke pride, “it gave Chicago a light to hold against the gathering dark of economic calamity, , , an assurance that for as long as it lasted nothing truly bad could happen to anyone, anywhere”. (3) Chicago presented an image of itself to its citizens and the world.

Daniel Burnham was the leading planner of the fair as Director of Works. Together with landscape architect Frederick Law Olmstead, he transformed swampy marshland into a fairground that was so grand “it continues to be a fascination more than a century later”. (4) Together, he and his national team of architects “conjured a dream city whose grandeur and beauty exceeded anything each singly could have imagined. Visitors wore their best clothes and most somber expressions, as if entering a great cathedral. Some wept at its beauty.” (5) Everything about the fair was designed to be an experience, exotic and grand. It took three years of preparation and work and although dedication ceremonies were held on October 21, 1892, the fairgrounds were not opened to the public until May 1, 1893. The fair occupied over one square mile, 630 acres in Jackson Park and the Midway Plaisance, and filled more than 200 buildings.

What would the theatrical experience have been in 1893?

Burnham loved escorting friends and dignitaries through the grounds, and orchestrated the journey so they would see the fair the way he believed it should be seen, with the buildings presented from a certain perspective, in a particular order. He understood the role of perspective in organizing the space and the experience. There were many gates of entry but both his tours began at the Grand Court.

If he was meeting people on the west side of the park, his tours began as they walked through a large portal at the rail station.

Opposite this entrance, his tours from the east side began at the exposition wharf and pier on Lake Michigan. He was a master of good showmanship and this route made the most powerful first impression.

“The Court of Honor produced an effect of majesty and beauty that was far greater than even the dream conjured. . . No single element accounted for this phenomenon. Each building was huge to begin with, but the impression of mass was amplified by the fact that all the buildings were neoclassical in design, all had cornices set at the same height, all had been painted the same soft white, and all were so shockingly, beautifully unlike anything the majority of visitors ever had seen in their own hometowns.” (6)

The earliest visitors to Jackson Park saw immediately that the fair’s greatest power lay in the strange gravity of the buildings themselves. Burnham chose the classical Beaux Arts style as the unifying theme for all the main buildings (much to the chagrin of some architects like Louis Sullivan) and to accelerate the building process, the architects agreed and Burnham decreed to color the exteriors of the main buildings white using ordinary white lead and oil. The “White City” was designed to be constructed quickly and be temporary, so most buildings used wood construction clad in staff, a resilient mixture of plaster and jute that could be molded into columns and statuary and spread over wood frames to provide the illusion of stone. Visitors marveled at this aesthetic.

The shared color white produced an especially alluring range of effects as the sun traveled the sky casting the buildings in blue during sunrise and more of an ochre during sun sets. These were stage sets.

Burnham moved with his guests through the Grand Court to an electric launch

that would carry his group silently through the basin and around to the lagoon, the landscaped centerpiece of the fair with its Wooded Island. It’s easy to imagine being with him, floating on the water as it scatters “the white city reflected upon its surface. The setting sun gilded the terraces on the east bank but cast the west bank into dark blue shadow. . . Voices drifted across the water, laced now and then with laughter that rang like crystal touched in a toast”.(7)

Across this lagoon in Jackson Park, on the north border of North Pond, occupying a whopping five acres of land was the northernmost large building of the fair, the Palace of Fine Arts. The theatrical experience continued as visitors boarded gondolas to cross the pond to the front door of the palace facing south at water’s edge.

Once there, visitors would climb the steps and enter the building through large Ionic columns flanking the main entrance as if they were entering a grand neo-classical temple.

The fair’s chief architect, Charles Atwood, was known for his love of classical proportion and designed the building to be perfectly symmetrical, in true Beaux Arts style. The building is designed as a domed Greek cross connected with pavilions, the large dome rising above its center. The building is 1,145 feet long (as long as the 100-story-John Hancock Tower building is tall) and encompassed 600,000 sq. ft. of exhibition space.

In addition to the Ionic columns, notable exterior features include 24 caryatids (sculpted female figures serving as an architectural support taking the place of a column or pillar) and various frieze elements recalling the Athenian Parthenon and other ancient structures. The exterior architecture is inspired by ancient Greek and Roman architecture which conveyed a sense of formality and importance. This at-once familiar classicism infused the building with an immediate sense of historical credibility.

When the fair ended, the building was renamed the “Columbian Museum” because the city wanted to preserve the memory of the exposition with a museum that would contain the many abandoned artifacts brought to Chicago from around the world.

What would the theatrical experience be now?

Today, much farther north, Soldier Field and the Field Museum (also designed by Burnham) sit in Burnham Park. Burnham Park runs south in a narrow green border along the lakeshore all the way to Jackson Park and the original Palace of Fine Arts, transformed into a permanent structure, the Museum of Science and Industry.

Today’s museum, though no longer white, sits in the exact same spot as the original.

The south entrance of the museum is closed to the public but still borders North Pond and the water still laps against the steps into the museum.

Up until recently, visitors could walk around the original lagoons and North Basin and onto the Wooded Island which is now a wild and tangled place perhaps more like Olmsted would have wanted it to be. The sheer scale of the fair came to mind standing along these paths and viewing the museum in the distance. The picture below shows Osaka Garden, a Japanese stroll garden nestled on the north end of the Wooded Island in Jackson Park. The Japanese government provided a building to Chicago for the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition and in 1934, Chicago established a garden at the site.

In 2015, the Army Corps of Engineers received 8.1 million dollars to begin a five year habitat restoration project at Jackson Park around Wooded Island. The museum is still visible in the distance.

 West side of the lagoon.

 East side of the lagoon.

The main entrance into the Museum of Science and Industry is now on the north side of the museum so no gondolas carry visitors across the basin.

The breath of the exposition is easy to conjure with a walk up to the Museum of Science and Industry to take in its grandeur as it stands alone in Jackson Park reminding us of the “greatest fair ever held on American soil”. (9)

The Possibilities.

The 1893 Columbian Exposition revealed to its early visitors a vision of what a city could be and should be. “The Black City to the north (Chicago) lay steeped in smoke and garbage but here in the White City of the fair visitors found clean public bathrooms, pure water, an ambulance service, electric streetlights, and a sewage processing system that yielded acres of manure for farmers. There was daycare for the children of visitors . . . at the Children’s Building. Visitors encountered devices and concepts new to them and to the world”. (10)

“The fair’s greatest impact lay in how it changed the way Americans perceived their cities and their architects. It primed the whole of America- not just a few rich architectural patrons- to think of cities in a way they never had before. . . to new ideas of architectural beauty and nobility. The fair taught men and women steeped only in the necessary to see that . . . cities could also be beautiful”. (11)

The vision of the “White City” inspired William Snead to write If Christ Came To Chicago, the book often credited with launching the City Beautiful movement, which sought to elevate American cities to the level of the great cities in Europe. The fairgrounds integrated the designs of the landscapes, promenades, and buildings which in turn, showed what is possible when planners, landscape architects, and architects work together on a comprehensive design scheme. Again, many civic authorities throughout the world saw the fair as a model of what cities could try to become.

“If evenings at the fair were seductive, the nights were ravishing.” (12) It was also called the White City because of the extensive use of street lights, which made the boulevards and buildings usable at night, even enchanting. The numbers of visitors increased as word spread that Chicagoans could stroll at night in relative safety.

At the fair’s closing in October, 1894, “Beneath the stars the lake lay dark and sombre”, Stead wrote, “but on its shore gleamed and glowed in golden radiance the ivory city, beautiful as a poet’s dream”. (13)

And the “White City” did dazzle! Walking the lakefront of Chicago reinforces the relevance of the city as theatre- the drama of a successful plan, referenced and expanded thoughtfully over time. What a testament to the will of Chicago, as a city, to take on the impossible in the name of civic honor in the first place, to try so many new things and be successful, and have so many different types of people came together to accomplish something so extraordinary.

Essential History for The Palace of Fine Arts

(now The Museum of Science and Industry)

The Palace of Fine Arts was unique because it housed the finest art from around the world (over 10,000 artistic works) and had to be fireproofed.  The building had a brick substructure beneath the walls and concrete floors making it the fair’s strongest structure.

1905.

The building was temporarily named “The Columbian Museum” right after the fair and then renamed “The Field Museum of Natural History” with a one-million-dollar endowment from Marshall Field.

1921.

The Field Museum moved to its present home at the south end of Grant Park leaving the original building vacant.  The building was in such disrepair- the roof was continually leaking, the exterior staf walls were deteriorating, the foundations were suffering from a high water table and water-logged sand- that the South Park Board voted to demolish it.

One of many preservationist victories, the preservation efforts of a citizens group convinced the city to restore the building.

1926.

The building was incorporated and backed financially by an initial $3,000,000 gift from Julius Rosenwald, chairman of Sears Roebuck and Co. who was inspired by a visit to the Deutsches Museum in Munich the world's largest museum of science and technology and the exhibits he saw there.

After that, support and funding continued through the Commercial Club of Chicago.

1928. The Museum of Art and Science.

Name changed to the Museum of Art and Science and then the Museum of Science and Industry.

1929-1933.

Extensive renovation begins working towards an opening in 1933 to coincide with Chicago’s 1933 World’s Fair. When completed, the exterior renovation is an exact copy of the original. The firm, Graham, Anderson, Probst & White choose to completely reconstruct the outside walls removing all the exterior staff and replacing it with 28,000 tons of Indiana limestone.  The building is no longer white.

When completed, the interiors are completely remodeled. Architects Shaw Naess & Murphy choose to redesign the interiors with a more modern Art Deco style.

1933. The Museum of Science and Industry.

The first of three stages of the new Museum of Science and Industry opens just in time for the 1933 World’s Fair, “A Century of Progress International Exposition”, celebrating the city’s centennial. At its opening only 10% of the building was occupied by exhibits. The University of Chicago Hospitals rented the unoccupied space for medical record storage. Structural work and installation continued into 1936.

1955.

The Museum of Science and Industry received Chicago Landmark status.

1986.

The completion of the Henry Crown Space Center and Omnimax Theater is the first substantial expansion to the museum.

1989.

The Museum of Science and Industry received National Landmark status for its WWII German U-505 submarine exhibit.

1995.

The museum received approval in stages to add two new wings, and an underground parking garage.

Today, the main entrance continues to be on the north side but through a separate, detached structure where visitors descend into an underground area and reascend into the main building.

2016.

According to its own website, the Museum of Science and Industry is “bringing science to life for the whole family since 1933”. Over 2,000 exhibits occupy over 400,000 sq. ft.

The museum is devoted to the “display and exploration of scientific and technological advancements”.

Architectural critics of the fair felt it replaced more contemporary expressions of architecture (the first Chicago School of Architecture for instance) with a renewed devotion to obsolete classical styles, but that view was too simplistic. The fair awakened America to beauty, transported fairgoers to another world and reignited Chicago’s sense of place.

“Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men’s blood”. (Daniel H. Burnham, Director of Works, World’s Columbian Exposition, 1893).

(1) www. chicagoarchitecture.org, "Museum of Science and Industry", Chicago Architecture Foundation, 2016.

(2) www.chicagoarchitecture.org

(3) The Devil In The White City, Murder, Magic, And Madness At The Fair That Changed America, Erik Larson, 2003. (Page 289)

(4) www.chicagoarchitecture.org

(5) The Devil In The White City (Page 5)

(6) The Devil In The White City (Page 252)

(7) The Devil In The White City (Page 253)

(8) www.chicagoarchitecture.org

(9) www.chicagoarchitecture.org

(10) The Devil In The White City (Page 247)

(11) The Devil In The White City (Page 374)