When is the last time that Oak Park’s District 97 elementary schools built a decent-looking building? I’m no architect. But the evidence before us suggests I’m not far off when I pin it at 1924, the year that Lowell School was completed at the corner of Lake and Forest.
Of course Lowell was sold off in 1971 and demolished shortly after that, a mere 47 years after its handsome construction. So you’ve got no way to tell that my architectural instincts are correct and that this school district wouldn’t know a good-looking building from bad instructional software.
Right now they are busily proving my point as they determinedly continue to erect a new headquarters building at 214 Madison St. Calling it pedestrian would be too kind. Cautiously retro might apply but who would bother to bring back elements of mid-century modern office construction?
Nearly all that is ugly in Oak Park was built in the 1960s. And the new D97 HQ looks to have been imported from a General Mills office campus of that era. Have you driven by? What is with the white brick, the rectangular and unpleasingly spaced windows?
Watching this building move from renderings to three dimensions reminds me that 18 months ago three local architects approached the school leadership and proposed seeking designs by actual notable architects and not the usual school-design folks who churn out endless variations of boring.
Since the schools had been considering ways to build a new headquarters for decades and had only just come through a screwy negotiation with the village government for a site and a funding source, the schools decided it was too late to reach high and moved ahead with their workaday plan.
The saving grace for six months of the year is that the trees in the Madison Street median are starting to blossom out and render the building less visible.
Wouldn’t be so critical of the schools if they didn’t owe us big time for the twin blobs of middle school they dumped a mile apart on Washington Boulevard two decades back. We’ve only just finished paying off the bonds, so it is likely too soon to propose a referendum to implode them and start over.
Proponents of the middle schools have been telling me since 1994 that they work very well on the inside and that that is what counts. Since I haven’t had a kid in the middle schools since they were constructed, I have had few occasions to test that theorem. However, I subscribe to the quaint notion that ugly on the outside is just bad.
Perhaps the school board members and administrators at D97 suffer from Stockholm syndrome, having been holed up for 45 years in the absolute worst school headquarters ever retrofitted out of a car dealership. That would be 970 Madison St., the prison-like mess with the hideous concrete exterior and narrow-slat windows. Spend a half-century in that leaking, creaking mess and the new building down the street likely looks swell.
I have noted in the past that the D97 superintendent’s office, right at the corner of Madison and Home, behind two of those grim little windows, is the ugliest, most claustrophobic space in the village. The cops, locked in the basement of village hall, have better digs than the superintendent.
Certainly Supt. Carol Kelly will have a nicer office in the new building. Perhaps the board room will have windows and not wood paneling from Menards. The AC and heating will work. The roof will not leak.
All good.
But at $8 million-plus it would have been nice if this latest investment by taxpayers had aimed higher than merely functional.
