On Design and Architecture: Musings on Crow Island by Dave Wheelan

Sometime this fall, hundreds of alumni from around the country will gather to celebrate the 75th anniversary of a public elementary school in the Chicago suburb of Winnetka. These graduates are not returning to sing old songs or honor heros that attended the school. They will be coming to honor its design.

The celebration of architecture, particularly from the 20th century onwards, is typically reserved for such landmark structures as airport terminals, museums, skyscrapers or private homes but rarely does it acknowledge successful buildings whose average user will be ten years old.

In general, public schools in this country, and particularly elementary schools, are rarely honored for their design. Perhaps it’s a question of modest budgets or the simple architectural demands of a classroom or a gym, but nonetheless there seems to be a painfully small number of schools, and their designers, who gain long term recognition in this category. The Crow Island School maybe a real exception is that regard.

Blessed by circumstances of timing and good luck, the contract for Crow Island School in 1940 was awarded to a very young and inexperienced architect named Erno Saarinen, who would later design the brilliant St. Louis Gateway, the TWA terminal at JFK Airport, and the Dulles International Airport.

Fresh out of teaching design at Cranbrook in Michigan, where his father (the legendary Finnish architect Eliel Saarinen) became an instructor after WWII, Saarinen joined a partnership with Perkins, Wheeler, and Will to work with Winnetka’s innovative school superintendent Carlton Washburne to design a radically new model for educating elementary school children.

From interviewing children and their teachers, as well as his own experience as a student in Danish elementary schools, Saarinen wanted the building to be “child-centered” with each classroom being a home for the entire day. With almost unlimited natural light created by large low windows, a private exit to the outdoor woods, acoustically treated ceilings, a private workroom, private bathroom, endless blackboard space and other fixtures placed at the proper height for little people, Saarinen created a special world for children that now has been copied in some form or another in almost every school built today.

The net result of this collaboration has been heralded by architectural historian and scholars around the country as an exceptional model of innovation which has brought thousands of architecture enthusiasts to the North Shore to pay homage.

And as a former pupil of Crow Island myself, I will be joining my former classmates on architectural tours and seminars on the building in October, but I fear the best part of the building’s design might be overlooked which are the stunning ceramic reliefs created by Erno’s wife, Lily Swann Saarinen.

Lily Swann Saarinen Ceramic reliefs (Crow Island School)

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I have no doubt that the building itself impacted my sense of learning. And it seems clear that a high percentage of my classmates feel the same way. But it was Lily Swann’s marvelously surreal images of animals and American Indians that seemed to have the most impact on me when I first arrived for kindergarten in 1960 and they still do when I see them at sixty.

Those wonderful images were on a constant reminder of the power of play. As a child, they seemed delightfully comical but not in a distorted way. They greeted each kid every morning in the same way as capturing a glimpse of a loved but underappreciated teddy bear sitting in the corner of the child’s bedroom.

As an adult, there is an almost childlike glee in seeing them again. They sit just as nobly in their class courtyards as they did when I was a kid, still pulsating with a addictive sense of freshness and the modern. That’s worth honoring on its own.

Crow Island School
1112 Willow Road
Winnetka, Illinois

Dave Wheelan is the publisher and executive editor of the Chetertown Spy and Talbot Spy on the Eastern Shore of Maryland.

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