True to Its History: Crow Island School Remains Child-Centered
By Rick Young
When school district officials and the local community in Winnetka considered expanding and upgrading the modernist gem of an elementary school, Crow Island School, they faced a number of challenges.
The team from Perkins&Will, which was part of the original design team alongside Eliel and Eero Saarinen in 1940, and the designers of the first expansion in 1954, managed to maintain the school’s historic legacy, set in a parklike setting in the Chicago suburbs, while responding to 21st-century academic requirements.
Core to Crow Island, an elementary school in Winnetka SD 36, is the durability of the original vision of its first superintendent, Carleton Washburne. Students are at the center of every design decision, from window heights calibrated to children’s lower sightlines to L-shaped classrooms that encourage flexible learning arrangements and provide classrooms access to the courtyards for indoor/outdoor teaching.
But the school was aging and in need of more space. In recent years, administrators brought in mobile classrooms to manage student overcrowding. There was no cafeteria, because Crow Island School was designed at a time when students went home for lunch, so students gathered in the main lobby and lower-level spaces for lunch.
Given that Crow Island School is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, expansion had to be sensitively managed. The school district convened meetings with members from the park district, state Historic Preservation Commission, village, community, and Perkins&Will to discuss the design for dedicated rooms for music, language, and art; a new gymnasium; spaces for students with diverse needs requiring specialized instruction in smaller settings; and a lunchroom.
Throughout the process, participants returned to the central theme: That the interests of the children come first. “What has always made this school so special is that the design is centered on the child,” says Kelly Tess. Ed.D., Superintendent of Winnetka SD 36. “That’s why we are here, and we were all mindful that this was not a typical school renovation. The community wanted to make sure every piece fit together.”
That meant attention to the color and pattern of the brick, the color of the playground equipment, the placement of the new gym, and more.
A key early decision was to connect the expansion of the new gym and classrooms to the 1954 addition. The new addition matches the roof heights of the existing four wings, maintaining the low profile and horizontal massing. The importance of maintaining access from each new classroom like the previous ones, L-shaped classrooms to the outdoor courtyards continues with the new addition. Classrooms in each wing of the existing building have been modified to have accessible entrances from the corridor and ramps to the exterior courtyard.
Among the challenges designers faced was finding historically compatible windows with aluminum systems that matched original proportions while incorporating modern double glazing with thermal breaks. Inspiration for the vertical slot glass block windows on the south face of the gym was taken from the glass block in the exterior wing wall on the north end of the original 1940 building. The northern clerestory window wraps downward at the gym entrances to help further break up the mass of the gym facing the neighborhood.
Matching the color and texture of existing brick of older buildings to new construction is always an extremely difficult aesthetic endeavor. The distinctive brick on both the original 1940 building and the 1954 addition is Chicago Common, which is a different size from modern brick. The design team worked with multiple brick producers, viewing dozens of brick varieties alongside the school district to identify the best possible solution, closely harmonizing with the 1954 addition in color, tone, and texture
Vastly different security requirements from 1940 to 2025 led to reworking the school’s entry, where a security desk in the main lobby had been the primary clearance feature. The existing vestibule was expanded into the adjacent area with a check-in window that allows the school to vet visitors before they gain entry into the building. Attention to detail was so specific that designers salvaged and reused the existing limestone to create the portal delineating the existing vestibule from the security check-in area.
All told, after expansion and renovation, Crow Island School remains true to its founder’s vision. “You can see that Crow Island is still Crow Island,” says Tess. “We worked really hard to remain true to our history. The conversation always came back to the child.”