In a facile homage to Ronchamp's mystical interior, Booth slices a variety of odd-shaped windows into the east-facing wall.įrom there, the inside of the museum lays out with admirable clarity: A child-size main street, including such familiar Children's Museum exhibits as the kid-size Dominick's supermarket, stretches westward. It houses a big, lodgelike room with a cocoa bar and a gourmet pretzel shop, which allows kids to twist and bake their own pretzels. Then, taking a page from Frank Lloyd Wright, Booth plays a classic "press and release" game, leading you into a lobby where the space explodes as you look up to the A-frame's underside. It's not that they're not well designed for kids, but that they look so much like the very thing Booth was trying to get away from - the Glen, with its phony traditionalism.Įntering beneath the A-framed roof, which is somewhat grotesquely oversize on its north end, you are compressed within a small, low-ceilinged foyer. But if you do go - the target audience ranges from newborns to 8-year-olds, along with their parents and caregivers - you're likely to enjoy it, though you may cringe at some of the exhibits. Better yet, the Chicago landscape architect Peter Schaudt has handsomely integrated green elements into the design, most notably the earth mounds that subtly echo the building's rooflines.Įven if you never set foot inside, then, this building contributes something to the landscape. Yes, you're going to have to drive to it unless you live in the Glen, but it's full of energy-saving green features, from its light-colored roof, which reflects heat instead of absorbing it (thus reducing the load on the building's air conditioners), to its low-flow toilets, which use less water than typical fixtures. Suburbia is often associated with wasting resources - sprawling subdivisions eating up farmland and forcing people to drive everywhere, even to the corner store to get a carton of milk - but the museum shows us a more enlightened suburbia. There's something else to like about this building: It's very green. The Midwestern flatlands of the Glen aren't exactly the hills of rural France. Its sculptural presence owes something, perhaps, to the Swiss-born architect Le Corbusier's great Expressionist chapel at Ronchamp, France. It makes a landmark for adults, yet it's whimsical (and memorable) enough that children should be able to trace an outline of it once they get home. The building is exciting without being cartoonish, simple but not simplistic. If Booth had followed its example, as Glenview planners asked him to do, he would have produced a children's museum that looked like an old-fashioned school. With an occasional exception, like the old Air Station control tower that anchors the main shopping street, the Glen's architecture is polite to the point of dull. It's part of the Glen, an instant town-within-a-town of traditional brick homes, offices, schools and shops. in north suburban Glenview and opening to the public Thursday, the $18 million museum occupies what used to be a taxiway at the Glenview Naval Air Station, which closed in the 1990s.
The architect, Laurence Booth of the Chicago firm Booth Hansen, strenuously denies such symbolism.
It's a fun building with fun interactive exhibits, even if it isn't a great work of architecture. But I like it and I suspect they will too. The most important critics who will assess the new Kohl Children's Museum of Greater Chicago, the children who will use it, still have to weigh in.
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