Feb. 6, 2025 Ι Architect’s Newspaper
Based on a child-centered and scaled view of primary school pedagogy that celebrates learning in landscape and artisanal craft, Crow Island School, in the North Shore Chicago suburb of Winnetka, is typically regarded as the first modernist school in the nation. Now, it is undergoing an exacting renovation and addition that will allow it to function as its original designers intended and will continue its legacy as a school grounded in creative exploration.
Since it was completed in 1940, the school, designed by Lawrence Perkins, founder of Perkins&Will, and Eero and Eliel Saarinen, has been expanded only once before, in 1954. This contemporary addition, designed by Perkins&Will, will feature dedicated classrooms for music, language, and art, and a new gym. The original building will also be updated with a multipurpose gym and lunchroom, dedicated smaller classrooms for one-on-one or small group instruction, and a refreshed library.
The budget for this project, $21 million, was approved by popular vote via a property tax–supported bond issue passed in 2022. (Crow Island was the largest single item in a $60 million package of funding for local schools.) The project will be complete next fall.
The recipient of the AIA Twenty-Five Year Award in 1971, Crow Island School is legendary for the way it uses a modernist formal language to embody the progressive, child-centric pedagogical philosophy of John Dewey, who emphasized learning via self-directed experimentation and imagination, rather than rote memorization. And while it’s immediately recognizable from its asymmetrical slab clock tower and warm-hued Chicago common brick, its expansive windows and wooded site powerfully determine the experience of the school as well, wallpapering classrooms in foliage and natural light.
Uniquely, Crow Island School’s classrooms are L-shaped, accommodating a standard classroom and a smaller, subordinate zone for student-led projects and independent, creative study. This 90-degree bend becomes a self-contained place for students to learn outside of traditional teacher-pupil hierarchies, creates more surface area for windows, and cradles another of the school’s signature design features: its landscaped outdoor courtyards, which function as extensions of the classroom. “If you didn’t even use the courtyards, what it provides with the amount of exterior glass is remarkable,” Mark Jolicoeur, principal at Perkins&Will’s Chicago office, told AN.
Crow Island’s addition will tack on another wing of classrooms and a gym to its 1954 addition (also by Perkins&Will), extending the building to the south. Prosaic, if vital, elements of the renovation will include the long-awaited addition of air conditioning and new layers of controlled access, which will aid security: A secure alcove at the main entrance will allow staff to engage visitors from behind a locked door before they’re admitted to the rest of the building. Currently, lunch is served in the auditorium lobby and basement (the lack of a cafeteria is a relic from a time when kids returned home for lunch), and the multipurpose cafeteria and gym will consolidate dining students and custodial scurrying. “We get to take back some of these spaces that we’ve been using for other things,” said Crow Island School principal Luke Livingston.
The basement library will be updated as well, with custom shelves and casework complete with colorful reading nooks; an adjacent maker-space STEAM lab will also be added. The visual noise of the exposed utility lines on the ceiling will be muffled by painting everything white.
Continuing the formal rhythm of the original, the new addition will add two new L-shaped classrooms (one dedicated to music and the other to language instruction), an art classroom, and a gym at the end of the corridor. The new 5,000-square-foot gym will be filled with natural light, as the designers at Perkins&Will put considerable effort into crafting a window system that would match the visual language of the original. A series of slotted block windows on one wall is set opposite a long, thin band of clerestory windows, which connect to a double-height window wall that encompasses a door to the outside.
Here and elsewhere, the architects took special care to respect the historical integrity of the original architecture by carefully selecting materials. This included matching brick colors and patterns, casework, and the aluminum window systems. Gunny Harboe of Harboe Architects, one of Chicago’s premier historic preservation firms, assisted Perkins&Will in the historic preservation details.
“We spent a lot of time mediating between what you would do back then, and what you could do now, and trying to make it fit in the frame once we made that decision,” said Bryan Schabel, design director and principal with Perkins&Will.
The original building uses classic Chicago common brick, but the closest matches today have slightly different dimensions when mortared and stacked. To make sure it would all match, the design team did “an extensive amount of onsite sample reviews and mock-ups to get as close a color and texture match as possible,” said Rick Young, an associate principal at Perkins&Will.
“We had four [or] five meetings where we were putting bricks up next to [each other],” said Livingston.
Indeed, the wider school community wanted to preserve “almost everything,” said Kelly Tess, superintendent of Winnetka’s public school system. This included the color of playground equipment, the paint on the fire escape ladder, and the stain on the concrete in the entry vestibule. “Every single detail was considered so that when this is complete, there’s not some piece that stands out that looks like it couldn’t have been part of the original era of the building.”
But to stay true to Crow Island School’s legacy of education based in creative exploration, Perkins&Will had to find a way to instill opportunities for artisanal handicraft amid their tight focus on historical authenticity. Perhaps best embodied in the original building by the decorative tiles and sculptures by Lillian Swann Saarinen (Eero’s first wife, whom he left for Aline Louchheim) depicting animals, as well as the Ponderosa pine pin-up walls in classrooms, the design team looked for opportunities to foreground art in public settings. This included identifying locations for art in the classroom courtyards and creating display cases along the exterior of the art room. The designers also included double layers of windows—on the exterior and interior walls—into the art room so visitors, faculty, and students can see the imaginative work going on from outside.
Ralph Johnson, Perkins&Will principal, compares Crow Island to a city: It’s a composition of individual neighborhoods that generate their own rhythm and heterogenous vitality. “Classrooms are like the houses, [and] there’s an assembly of common shared facilities and individual learning elements coming together into this city for children,” he said. The rectilinear clock tower spire plays the role of a downtown high-rise, attached to the main spine of common programs used by all, a loose analogy for a bustling central business district flanked by rows of classrooms, in the manner of residential neighborhoods.
With its child-scaled dimensions; rational, near-modular plan; and landscape immersion, Crow Island School is a self-contained learning village, a fragile spell its designers are taking great pains not to break. “This space is a constant reminder why we’re all here,” said Tess, “which is for children.”