The Museum of Science and Industry, once called the Palace of Fine Arts, was built as a tribute to classic Greek architecture for the 1893 World’s Colombian Exposition. The building is considered one of the most regal structures in the Midwest. More than two-thousand exciting and intriguing displays are housed in seventy-five major exhibition halls. Best loved exhibits include the dark and labyrinthine coal mine, the chick hatchery where you can actually watch baby chicks being born, a yesteryear tour of State Street showing the way it looked a hundred years ago and the simulated lift-off of a NASA Space Shuttle.
The Omni-Max Theater, located in the Henry Crown Space Theater, has the most sophisticated film and sound system in the world; an audience is literally surrounded by a giant screen five stories tall that wraps viewers in a visual experience so powerful they feel as if they are actually walking on the moon, or climbing the pyramids or helping a family of beavers build a home in the middle of a river bed. In addition, you can walk through the heart of a human being twenty-eight stories tall or wind your way through a World War Two German submarine.
The museum lies along the edge of Chicago's Hyde Park community near Lake Michigan. Here you will be able to view some of the city's oldest historic homes and tour a Frank Loyd Wright House located only a few blocks from the University of Chicago campus.
This elaborate miniature house was created by silent film star Colleen Moore in the 1930s, and was donated to the Museum of Science and Industry in 1949.