Three hundred and fifty thousand cubic feet of white Georgia marble, quarried in the South and shipped a thousand miles north. That's the Field Museum, and large parts of it were copied off a specific temple in Athens.
Find the ends of the building, where instead of plain columns there are rows of tall robed women holding the roof on their heads. Those are caryatids, and they're lifted directly from the Erechtheion, a temple on the Acropolis in Athens, which is about two and a half thousand years old. Sculptor Henry Hering carved the Chicago versions. He also did the reliefs on the Michigan Avenue bridge towers, so the same hands that decorated a drawbridge also produced this row of Athenian women, staring out over a parking lot.
And this temple is built on garbage. The land under the museum was open water until Chicago pushed the shoreline out with coal cinders, ash from downtown furnaces, dredge spoil and construction rubble. They made a field, let it settle, and set a marble templ
e on top of it. Six years of construction, around seven million dollars, twenty acres of floor space, and the foundation is a landfill.
The stone tells on itself, if you know where to look. The marble arrived in two large orders, and the second came out of a slightly different seam. The north end of the building runs a shade warmer in color than the south end. The masons on the job called the pal
