Award
2016 Honor Award
Site
Chicago, IL
Size
23 acres
Client
The Field Museum of Natural History
Category
Planning and Analysis
Landscape Architects
Project Details
The Field Museum of Natural History is a cultural touchstone in the City of Chicago, and one of the largest natural history museums in the world. In an effort to further its goals for an energy efficient and sustainable facility maintenance program, the museum hired site to lead the Masterplan with subconsultant ecology + vision, llc. The team’s vision entailed creating a landscape that requires limited resources to maintain and promotes biodiversity through native plant systems within the museum campus. Working together with the museum, site led a Landscape Masterplan that extends the mission of the museum – to inspire curiosity about life on Earth while exploring how the world came to be and how we can make it better – to the 23-acre grounds surrounding the museum.
The Field Museum of Natural History Landscape Masterplan endeavors to expand the scope of the Field Museum’s objective by fostering growing community awareness of ecological processes, sustainable practices, and landscape restoration. This project envisions the Field Museum participates in larger ecological systems and landscape patterns within the Museum Campus, a network which has the potential to improve the overall ecological health of the City of Chicago’s lakefront. In turn, the Masterplan catalyzes additional sustainable landscape design and management at the regional level, and furnishes new interpretive and exhibit opportunities which will bolster the museum’s quest. As a civic institution of considerable prominence, a long reach, big ambitions, and an important education mission, the Field Museum has a unique opportunity to not only extend similar efforts to better integrate native ecologies and the urban environment efforts, but to spearhead additional change.
Project Team
ecology + vision, llc.