The real reason to treat these three museums as one 'place' isn't the buildings — it's the lakefront peninsula they sit on. The walk between Field, Shedd, and Adler is the best free skyline view in the city (especially the point behind Adler), and the grounds themselves are a genuine outing. The honest catch is cost and stamina: doing all three museums in a day is expensive and exhausting, so the smart play is one museum plus the free walk, not a three-museum forced march.