I've seen that somewhere (2)
Another in a series where I look at buildings that seem to echo ...
Chicago has a notably uncomfortable history with institutions of higher learning, and indeed with learning of any kind. While Chicago was chartered as a city in 1837, it didn't found its library until after (and indeed because of) the Great Fire of 1871. John D. Rockefeller was, I believe, chided for endowing the University of Chicago because such a raw, driven, materialistic and commercial city, so remote from the great cities of the East, seemed like no place for as genteel a place as a university. Even so, UChicago ended up in a part of the city that had been a separate town until the year before the university's founding. I believe that one factor in its siting was to kick-start development in its neighborhood, for the campus was built on until-then undeveloped land.
The
original developers of UChicago insisted on a Collegiate Gothic style
for the new campus, a move that excluded most of the really big names in
Chicago architecture.
Collegiate Gothic remained the
architectural style of the university until 1945. In early 1945, Joseph
Hudnut, the founding dean of the Graduate School of Design, Harvard's
school of architecture, architect and scholar of the history of
architecture and sculpture, gave a speech at the Art Institute of
Chicago, in which he may have mentioned the University's architecture. When asked later to expand those thoughts, he was unimpressed: he felt that the University's buildings
presented overall a rather weak interpretation of Gothic, and he had already gone on record saying Gothic was a poor choice for any university. He had already written at
length on architecture and universities in several publications. Given
that the existing buildings were going to long-lasting, Hudnut
recommended that the university
plan
every new building in a modern spirit, each unit scientifically
adapted, in accordance with modern techniques of planning, to its
specific purpose. I should try to find architects bold enough to do
this....In studying these new plans, I should be careful not to do
anything which would deliberately insult the ancient work. By this I
mean that the new architect should make every effort to bring about
whatever harmony is possible between the old and the new.
Hudnut's
criticism echoed that of Frank Lloyd Wright, who came to understand its
atmosphere while designing the Robie House near the campus. While Wright admired much about the liberal
spirit of the University, in 1930 he asked why should an American university in a land of democratic ideals in a machine age be charcterized by secondhand adaptation of Gothic forms?
While Collegiate
Gothic remains widely used, and the University maintains and
preserves its buildings, it no longer hews to a Gothic line. Its buildings since 1945 have incorporated Hudnut's ideas: the buildings
incorporate modern design principles while striving for some harmony
with the array of neo-gothic buildings on campus.
A recent example of this is the set of buildings designed by Studio Gang at the north end of campus. These buildings form a sort of quadrangle, along with the nearby Smart Museum, Court Theater and Crown Fieldhouse. Jeanne Gang has come up with a delightful concept contrasting dark windows againt white piers, which have evolving and interconnected shapes, and whose vertical spacing gradually changes.
Overall, this design is sympathetic to the gothic design of the main campus, with the repeating piers evoking colonades or cloisters. But its modern orientation come from its whiteness (looks like Le Corbusier white to my untrained eye) and its innovative abstract, almost sculptural forms.
Overall, these buildings represent part of the effort to welcome first-year students to campus. These buildings combine several aspects of student life: sleeping and study rooms in the taller units, dining in the central low building, and classrooms on the second floor. Many universities have recently constructed specialized units for their first-year students that will provide both living and classroom spaces.
Six or seven decades after the
University of Chicago was founded, Chicago's mayor had an ambtion to set
up an undergraduate school of the University of Illinois: the schools
of medicine, dentistry, nursing and pharmacy already were in Chicago, and an exploding student population caused by the GI
bill made the University of Illinois set up a two-year program in Chicago. The
expectation was that students would transfer to the "main" campus in
Champaign/Urbana to complete their education.
But the mayor
wanted a full campus. After some backroom dealing, a site in a largely lower class neighborhood about two miles southwest of
city hall was selected, over many objections by the residents of that
neighborhood. A large parcel of land was obtained and cleared, and a new
campus was designed and erected, planned by SOM's Walter Netsch. Some
saw this as removing urban blight; some felt that the existing neighborhood was
vital and functioning. Fourty years later, the topic still produces debate.
The new campus was designed to be entirely for
commuters: no dormitories were included in the plan. Eventually, dorms were added and a campus life gradually emerged, even tho UIC still (IMO) retains a strong commuter identity.
And then, a few years ago, they built this:
It's the Academic and Residential Complex and designed by the firm SCB (formerly known as Solomon Cordwell Buenz.)
The analogues with the new Gang complex at UChicago are substantial. Both have dark windows and white piers, the piers are simultaneously rhythmic and irregular, there's a sculptural form to the assemblage of buildings, and both have buildings on an angled footprint.
It is inconsequential that both are on the north ends of their respective campuses.
So indeed, there are substantial similarities between the two complexes; not enough that one is the inspiration of the other, or even that one influenced the design of the other. More likely, they both reflect current ideas and practices: architects are likely to deny - vehemently - being influnced by fashion, but when two design teams are presented with nearly identical challenges, is there any surprise that their proposed solutions be similar?
But if we loosen the criterea just a little, and look at projects in Chicago that
1) combine student learning and living;
2) have a high-profile, high-visibility location;
3) have a scuptural form, with rhythmic features;
then there is an earlier contender:
A 32 storey building would stand out in most cities, but a tower in Chicago's loop needs more than height to get noticed. The dark blue and aqua mirrored glass, with the mix of colors evolving as you glance up the tower is one thing. The alternating in-and-out of the eastern and western façades is another thing. (The shape was inspired by a well-known sculpture of the great modernist sculptor Constâtin Brancusi.) So the tower takes advantage of its high visibility location to introduce Roosevelt University to its community, nearly anyone who visits the Loop.
Designed by the firm VOA, which merged with, and was absorbed by, the Canadian firm Stantec, and built by Roosevelt University in 2012, it houses dormitory rooms on its upper half, classrooms, faculty offices and laboratories on seven floors below that, and five floors devoted to student life below that. I believe it is intended for first-year students, who would be able to go for weeks having a full college life without exiting the building.
All photos by the Author.
Websites from the various architects discussing these projects:
https://studiogang.com/project/university-of-chicago-campus-north-residential-commons
https://www.scb.com/project/academic-and-residential-complex/
https://www.stantec.com/en/projects/united-states-projects/r/roosevelt-university-vertical-campus
Comments
Post a Comment