Kenneth C. Griffin Museum of Science and Industry

Stand at the foot of the steps for a moment and look up. Pale columns rise in long, even rows. Above the porches, carved stone women hold up the roofline on their heads, calm and patient. Behind you, the lagoons of Jackson Park catch the light, and on a windy day you can smell Lake Michigan just to the east. It feels like a temple. In a way, it was built to be one... a temple to art, long before it became a temple to machines.

This is the Kenneth C. Griffin Museum of Science and Industry, on the South Side of Chicago, at the edge of the Hyde Park neighbourhood. It is one of the largest science museums in the Western Hemisphere. But the building is older than the museum inside it. Its story begins in 1893, with one of the most ambitious events this city has ever staged — the World's Columbian Exposition, a world's fair that marked four hundred years since Columbus reached the Americas.

For that fair, Chicago built a gleaming city of white Neoclassical palaces — buildings in the style of ancient Greece and Rome, with columns, domes and carved figures. Locals called it the White City. Almost all of those palaces were temporary. They were covered in staff, a mix of plaster and fibre that looked like marble but was never meant to last. Within a few years, fire and demolition took nearly all of them. This building is the great survivor.

It was the Palace of Fine Arts, designed by the architect Charles Atwood. Because it held paintings and sculptures on loan from around the world, it needed real protection from fire. So it was built with a sturdier brick structure underneath its plaster skin. That one practical decision is the reason it is still standing. Here is something most visitors miss: the stone you see today is not the original surface. In the late 1920s and 1930s, the fragile exterior was rebuilt in limestone, copying the old design.

After the fair, the building did not sit empty. For years it housed the Field Columbian Museum, the institution that later became the Field Museum of Natural History. When the Field Museum moved to its new home near downtown, this palace began to crumble. Many Chicagoans wanted it torn down. Then a businessman stepped in with a different idea.

That businessman was Julius Rosenwald, the head of Sears, Roebuck and Company. The story usually told is that he visited the Deutsches Museum in Munich, a German museum famous for letting visitors see real machines in action, and came home inspired. He wanted Chicago to have a museum where ordinary people could understand industry and invention with their own hands. He put his fortune behind the project. The museum opened in 1933, as Chicago hosted another world's fair, the Century of Progress.

Rosenwald, it is said, did not want the museum named after him. For most of its life, it was simply the Museum of Science and Industry. In 2019, the investor Kenneth Griffin gave the largest gift in the museum's history, and his name was added to the building. Many longtime Chicagoans still just call it the Museum of Science and Industry, or simply MSI.

Now step inside, and the scale changes. The temple outside gives way to enormous halls built to hold full-size machines. One of the oldest exhibits is a working replica of a coal mine, which has been part of the museum since its opening years. You ride down in a mine elevator, called a cage, into darkness and noise. It is a reminder of how much of American industry once depended on people working underground.

The most surprising object here may be a German submarine. The U-505 was captured at sea by the United States Navy in 1944, during the Second World War. It was a rare event — the first enemy warship taken in battle by the American navy since the nineteenth century. In 1954 the submarine came to Chicago, and today it rests in its own underground gallery. Standing beside its long grey hull, you understand how cramped life must have been for the crew inside.

Other giants wait upstairs and around corners. A real Boeing 727 airliner hangs from the balcony, as if it stopped mid-flight inside the building. Nearby stands the Pioneer Zephyr, a stainless steel streamlined train from the 1930s that once showed how fast and smooth diesel travel could be. And in one gallery, a huge model railroad runs through miniature cities, mountains and farmland, tracing a journey across America.

Then there is a much smaller wonder. The Fairy Castle was created by Colleen Moore, a film star of the silent era. It is an elaborate dollhouse filled with tiny chandeliers, paintings and furniture, many pieces crafted by skilled artisans. Visitors lean close to the glass in near silence. After the roar of trains and machines, this quiet room feels like a deep breath.

The museum has always changed with the times. Exhibits about weather let you watch a tall swirling column of mist rise like a tornado. Other galleries explore the human body, energy and space flight. A long-loved exhibit lets families watch baby chicks hatch from their eggs. The approach is the same one Rosenwald wanted — not just reading labels, but seeing, touching and testing ideas yourself.

When you leave, pause again on the steps. Look back at the carved women on the porches, and the columns that once framed paintings instead of engines. Then turn toward the park. The lagoons, the trees and the paths around you were part of the same great fair in 1893. Everything else from that white city is gone. Only this building remains... still full of people, still full of wonder, more than a century later.