INNER 

 SPACE 



THE MUSEUM EXPANDS 



James R. Shouba 

 Building Superintendent 



Xvbout half a century ago, a gifted 

 group of architects, Graham, Anderson, 

 Probst, and White, was commissioned 

 by Mr. Stanley Field, then President of 

 Chicago Natural History Museum, to 

 design and build a new, spacious, fire- 

 safe building to house the Museum's 

 collections and exhibits. By 1920, this 

 building was complete enough for the 

 staff to move in. 



We can easily imagine that upon first 

 viewing the vast, empty, echoing caverns 

 of the new structure the staff probably 

 thought they would never need more 

 space. In fact, I believe they were 

 thinking, "How shall we ever fill it?" 

 Generous aisles, work rooms, offices, and 

 collection storage areas were allocated, 

 as well as large exhibition halls. 



Because of the grand scale of the 

 Museum building, we still tend to re- 



Tfiis area, 208 feet long by 38 feet wide by about 31 feet high, is 

 currently being enclosed. The new construction will provide expan- 

 sion for the Museum Library and increased facilities for storage, re- 

 search, and graduate education in the Department of Geology. 



tain, after 50 years, this train of thought. 

 But with the continued growth of speci- 

 men collections in all divisions of the 

 Museum, we have been giving more 

 careful consideration to the use of our 

 remaining available space. 



When suddenly there came the op- 

 portunity to increase our usefulness by 

 acquiring the University of Chicago's 

 famous Walker Collection of fossil in- 

 vertebrates, we had to face up to hard 

 facts. Where could we possibly house 

 such a tremendous collection? 



Perhaps the architect purposely left 

 great open spaces between the masonry 

 of our second and third floors. Perhaps 

 he planned the large light wells so that 

 we could quite easily expand in 1964 

 without changing a single detail of the 

 building's classical exterior. At any rate 

 the solution that was worked out was so 

 easily adaptable to the architect's de- 

 sign that it seems as though it must have 



been planned in 1913-15. We decided 

 to fill in a light well in the northwest 

 corner of the Museum building. 



I 



n considering this solution, the first 

 question we needed to answer was 

 whether the space was large enough to 

 house the more than a million speci- 

 mens in the Walker Collection and pro- 

 vide for normal expansion of the De- 

 partment of Geology for at least the next 

 25 years. A preliminary layout for geol- 

 ogy storage cases was drafted to get a 

 rough idea of the capacity of the light 

 well. These studies indicated that the 

 capacity was more than the estimated 

 area required, so we proceeded with fur- 

 ther investigation. Expansion of the 

 book stack area of the Library was next 

 considered and the decision made to 

 place the stack room on the third floor 

 level immediately adjacent to the pres- 

 (Continued on page 8) 



AUGUST Page S 



