The University of Illinois Chicago was never meant to be an ordinary campus. And it’s held up its end of the bargain throughout its six decades of existence.
Mayor Richard J. Daley leveled parts of two vibrant immigrant communities to create the campus in the 1960s. Walter Netsch and his colleagues at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) created the monumental campus plan and original buildings at a moment when bold contemporary architecture was at its least restrained.
When I arrived as a graduate student in 1984, the failures of the original structures were already apparent. Raised granite walkways were dangerously slippery when wet and shed water onto perpetually shaded and dank sidewalks below. The monumental cast-in-place concrete central core, dubbed the Great Court, was a bleak windswept post-apocalyptic landscape most of the year. The original renderings and early photographs captured a promise that was unsustainable in Chicago’s harsh climate.
While the campus has seen many changes in the last four decades, most have been attempts to mitigate the greatest failures of Netsch’s vision without creating much memorable new work. But UIC’s newest addition — the Computer Design, Research, and Learning Center, or CDRLC — is the most hopeful architectural addition to the complex since the 1960s.
Seattle-based LMN Architects and local stalwart Booth Hansen have designed the undulating five-story-tall structure that’s attached to the south and west edges of the original Science and Engineering Laboratories (SELW and SELE) that were designed by SOM as part of the original campus. “We wanted to make sure we were designing a building that was really welcoming and inclusive, and provides a space for everybody to feel comfortable sitting and staying and lingering,” LMN associate partner Mark Nicol says.
A Chicago native, Nicol began his career studying architecture at UIC, and he recognizes that the campus’s earlier designs are not universally appreciated. “We wanted to make sure we were celebrating what we feel has intrinsic value, but also creating environments that are meaningfully different,” he said.
And the CDRLC is a willfully eccentric building. Its exterior is most notable for its gently curving facades across the building’s west and south faces. These surfaces are defined by a deeply sculpted and orange accented grid that changes its horizontal dimensions to indicate the main entrance and public spaces near the southwest corner. Along the west side, the second floor cantilevers slightly out from the face while the south side of the building steps back dramatically at the third level to break the mass and provide some private outdoor terraces. The grid is abruptly cut off at the top of the structure, as if construction stopped when the funds ran out. The designers acknowledge their debt to the campus grid.
“There’s the sense that the grid continues in perpetuity,” Nicol said. “The building is part of a grid that permeates everything.”
The most notable material on the exterior is the bright white precast concrete — a notable contrast to every other building in the area. The windows, which feature energy-efficient tinted glass, sit within deep recesses that help shade the sun while giving the overall building a reassuring sense of solidity. Orange terra cotta panels are set within the precast and suggest a lighter touch than the concrete that’s prevalent throughout the original buildings on campus. And it speaks of a wider context for the building: “The terra cotta was meant to reference the brick character of the existing campus, but also the tradition of terra cotta within the city of Chicago,” Nicol said.
The heart of the building is a sky-lit, five-story-tall L-shaped atrium that wraps the southwest corner of SELW and highlights its coarse concrete aggregate columns that are 5-foot-square at their base and bricks that are twice the size found elsewhere on the campus. “People walk around this campus all the time and don’t notice those amazing moments from the historic architecture,” Nicol said. “We put that in the center of the plan.”
The corner of the L — which the architects call “the knuckle” — contains an open stair between the upper floors and community-focused seating areas at each level. Floors 2 and 3 face the atrium with tall wood-slatted railings, while the two top floors sit behind a bronze metal mesh scrim. The finish recalls the steel roof structure of Netsch’s SELW, while its draped curves mimic the CDRLC’s overall forms.
“You can see through (it),” Nicol said. “But it also has some solidity, and it becomes a playful expression of that center community space.”
With a few exceptions, the first two levels are devoted to general classroom spaces that are used by any program in the university. The upper levels are more explicitly the domain of the computer science department. Two loading docks that previously housed trash dumpsters for the older building have been reclaimed as a visualization lab and a robotics lab. The second level has more general classrooms, small meeting rooms and open-plan tutoring spaces that support less-formal learning sessions. Ceiling heights throughout the building are generous as they match the adjacent SELW with connections across the atrium at every level.
The upper levels are devoted exclusively to computer science, with administrative offices, individual faculty offices, and smaller research and study spaces for students.
Long hallways are mitigated by comfortable built-in seating areas. And the corridors bend with the shape of the building and terminate with a windowed study area that provides sunlit spaces that promote unstructured meetings. “This little wiggle in the hallway makes the building feel softer and less imposing,” Nicol said.
Building on the UIC campus will always be fraught. While much of the original plan has been defanged over the decades, there’s still a lot of the original pieces that are now historical in nature. That’s certainly true of the monumental SELW structure that the CDRLC architects had to deal with.
But these designers have shown that the grid doesn’t have to be constricting. Concrete can be lighter and more durable than what Netsch and SOM used. And good architects can actually elevate the earlier structures when thoughtfully incorporating them into new designs. That’s exactly what LMN and Booth Hansen have accomplished in the CDRLC.
Edward Keegan writes, broadcasts and teaches on architectural subjects. Keegan’s biweekly architecture column is supported by a grant from former Tribune critic Blair Kamin, as administered by the not-for-profit Journalism Funding Partners. The Tribune maintains editorial control over assignments and content.
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