With the planting of a native Illinois burr oak tree in Lincoln Park, Chicago’s oldest museum observed the beginning of Earth Day week and construction of its new building.
It was no accident that the 140-year-old Chicago Academy of Sciences chose the hardy burr oak as the first tree planted on its new property at the northwest corner of Cannon Drive and Fullerton Parkway.
Burr oaks were designed by nature to survive the most intense prairie fires. The academy burned down twice–in 1866, and in the Chicago Fire of 1871–after its founding in 1857 by pioneer naturalist Robert Kennicott.
Still, the academy, once intended to rival the Smithsonian as an important natural history museum, managed to survive and become a small but important fixture in the city’s cultural life.
It was housed for 102 years in the beautiful, neo-classical granite Laflin building at Clark Street and Armitage Avenue.
The academy moved to temporary quarters at North Pier in 1995, when the Laflin building was converted to offices for Lincoln Park Zoo.
Late next year it is scheduled to move into its new, low-slung, glassed-in $20 million Nature Museum alongside North Pond in Lincoln Park.
The 73,000-square-foot building was designed around environmental and ecological themes intended to expose visitors to the everyday power and beauty of nature.
“How do we live in a sustainable world?” said Paul Heltne, the academy’s president, at the tree planting Saturday, attended by museum, city and Park District officials and neighborhood residents.
“This new museum is designed to help answer that question,” Heltne said.
Architect Ralph Johnson of Perkins & Will designed the museum now being built on a 12-acre site atop foundations of recently razed Park District city maintenance buildings.
Among the exhibit spaces inside is a vast, glass-enclosed butterfly haven where visitors walk among flowers and butterflies.
Other exhibits will show visitors current global weather patterns on giant maps, take them on a paleontologic tour of the Chicago area and allow them to build and operate river locks and dams.
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Grounds surrounding the museum will be on exhibit, too.
The museum removed about half of the 300 trees on the site. It will plant 140 new trees along with 10,000 other plants, many of them designed to attract birds and other wild animals.
Using new plantings and those already growing, landscape architect Carol Yetken designed five outdoor plant and wildlife communities typical of the Midwest.
They will include an oak and hickory hardwood forest, prairie grassland, pond and woodland edges, a limestone ravine, and a “succession” community, which typifies how nature moves back on neglected and abandoned land.