Guide On Map
Look around first
What to notice
- Twelve-sided structure
- Planetarium dome
- Zodiac signs on the façade
The story of the place
Max Adler, whose surname the planetarium bears, was not an astronomer. He made his fortune at Sears, Roebuck and Company: he began by selling musical instruments and eventually became a vice president and a major shareholder. In nineteen twenty-eight, Adler retired and decided to spend part of his money on Chicago.
An acquaintance told him about a new German invention. A Zeiss device projected stars and planets onto the inner surface of a dome: night could be summoned in the middle of the day, stopped, sped up, and shown as it could not be seen above an illuminated city. Adler went to Germany with the Chicago architect Ernest Grunsfeld Jr., the future designer of this building. They visited the planetarium in Munich and several other similar institutions. After the trip, Adler decided to give Chicago the first planetarium in the Western Hemisphere.
He provided five hundred thousand dollars. The money paid for the building, the projector, and a collection of antique astronomical instruments. The South Park Commission agreed to maintain the new institution at city expense. That is how a combination arose that remains here to this day: beneath the dome, an artificial sky is shown, while in the halls visitors learn which instruments people once used to measure the real one. Adler called the planetarium “a classroom under the heavens.”
A site was found for it on land that had not existed until very recently. Under the Plan of Chicago, five islands for recreation were to be filled in Lake Michigan. By nineteen twenty-eight, only the first was nearly complete. The Commission assigned the planetarium a promontory at its northern end and, after construction, replaced the temporary bridge with a permanent causeway. The other four islands never appeared.
On May twelfth, nineteen thirty, visitors were admitted beneath the new dome. The zodiac signs made by Alfonso Iannelli remain on Grunsfeld’s twelve-sided structure. Adler’s surname remained in the name of the institution he paid for, and the building still occupies the northern promontory of the only island built out of the five planned.
Useful on site
Check the official ticket calendar; Wednesday evening is free for Illinois residents with a timed slot, and last entry is usually an hour before closing.
Checked: July 1, 2026. Check the official source before visiting.The star programs and collections require a separate visit, but the view of the city also makes an exterior stop worthwhile.