Groundbreaking set for new entrance at South Portico of Griffin Museum of Science and Industry

Groundbreaking was set for Tuesday for a project to turn the South Portico of the Griffin Museum of Science and Industry into an active entrance.

The $22 million renovation will add an outdoor café, a public gathering space, and a terrace overlooking Jackson Park. The entrance would also be ADA accessible.

The South Portico is architecturally identical to the North Portico of the museum, with its row of limestone laurel wreaths, statuary, and of course, stately Ionic columns perfect for the museum where visitors can learn about ionic bonds in chemistry — among many other topics, of course.

The North Portico faces 57th Drive and the Hyde Park neighborhood, and used to have a surface parking lot in front of it before the parking lot was buried and the land turned into green space in the late '90s. The South Portico faces the pond known as the Columbia Basin in Jackson Park, but has not been a way in or out at any point since the building has been the Museum of Science and Industry — which will celebrate its centennial in 2033.

The area, for all intents and purposes, has always functioned as the back of the museum.

But as Chicago kids learn in elementary school, the Griffin Museum of Science and Industry started out as the Palace of Fine Arts at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition. During the fair, when an assortment of other Beaux Arts structures stood proudly all around Jackson Park, people traveled through gondolas through the lagoon and walked up the South Portico stairs to visit what is now the Griffin MSI, museum president and chief executive officer Chevy Humphrey explained.

More than 130 years later, Jackson Park is seeing a renaissance with the opening of the Obama Presidential Center just to the south of the Griffin MSI. Speaking to CBS News Chicago Political Reporter Chris Tye in August, Humphrey said it is time to connect the museum with the park.

"No one can enter from Jackson Park," Humphrey said in August. "You see how beautiful Jackson Park is, with the Japanese gardens, this incredible lagoon, and now with the Obama Presidential Center, there needs to be the opening that we need for our visitors."

The idea to reopen the building's south entrance came from the surrounding community in Woodlawn and Hyde Park.

"I went out and met with over 1,000 people my first year and had many community meetings, and community members actually said, 'Why are your doors closed to us when we're visiting Jackson Park?'" Humphrey said in August.

The South Portico is set to open in the winter of 2027.

Recently, the Griffin MSI also announced plans for alterations to the North Portico where the main entrance has always been, in the form of a welcome hall.

As described by Urbanize Chicago, the Welcome Hall will feature a low-slung archway that connects to the museum building by a glass structure. Renderings appear to show visitors entering the museum through the welcome hall both at grade level and by going up the stairs.

Part of the central area of the front stairs would be carved out for the accessible ground-level entrance, Urbanize Chicago reported.

The plan for the Welcome Hall will also include an adjacent outdoor Science Gardens, which will be open to the public without admission, the Griffin MSI said.

The existing underground entry hall will become additional exhibition space, the Griffin MSI said.

Both the changes to the South Portico and the planned welcome hall at the North Portico have been less than welcomed by some critics. In the Chicago Tribune, City of Chicago cultural historian emeritus Tim Samuelson wrote that the changes to the entrances would be "the most seriously damaging" alteration he has ever witnessed to the Griffin MSI, with the only thing worse being the demolition of entire historic buildings.

"With the approved alterations to the Griffin Museum of Science and Industry, the building will essentially remain standing," Samuelson wrote in the Tribune this week. "But the changes will destroy the essence of what makes the building rare and special. It's all about an elusive quality known as perfection."

Samuelson wrote that as the Palace of Fine Arts during the World's Fair, what became the Griffin MSI building was "repeatedly singled out for being as near to perfection as could be humanly achievable in its architectural composition and the relationship to its site." He also noted that when the building became the Museum of Science and Industry after falling into abandonment and ruin, its plaster exterior was rebuilt down to every detail in limestone.

With the changes coming to the North and South Porticos, Samuelson wrote, the staircases on both sides will be "punctured" to leave a "gap-toothed large hole" at the center, while the porticos themselves will be glassed in.

In the Chicago Sun-Times last month, architecture critic Lee Bey also took issue with the welcome center plan for the Griffin MSI's North Portico. He called the welcome hall an "ungainly and unattractive pavilion that visually overpowers the building's historic north entrance and its beautiful, open front lawn," and compared it to "a big old wide-brimmed hat blocking the screen at the movie theater."

However, Bey wrote that the South Portico alterations seemed to be "more appropriate and less monumental in approach, according to the latest renderings."