Case study - Northwestern University sites

Evanston - Chicago, USA

Northwestern University comprises a neo-gothic campus located north of Chicago proper, although it lies within range of the Chicago Loop, it is most directly related to the separate city of Evanston. The campus is bracketed from the south-east by the city of Evanston, and to the east by the shores of Lake Michigan, with which the campus has a direct relationship. Unlike the two other US university campuses studied here (UIC and IIT), Northwestern’s campus was not formed as part of a de novo institution on a tabula rasa site; for much of the university campus was already established and the university itself was formed in 1851. However, the university can still be considered urban, by virtue of its proximity to Evanston, notwithstanding the physical separation of the neo-gothic campus from the city by means of expansive lawns, wide building curtilages and landscaped areas which dissociate campus and city.

In the postwar period, when the university recognised the global demand for expansion in higher education, the requirement for physical campus expansion was deemed necessary. However, the proximity of the university to the city of Evanston, in particular the affluent residential areas in which the campus was located, proved a major barrier to new development. The university found itself in a dilemma whereby it could not satisfy the need to expand without compromising either; its civic responsibility to the citizenry, or sacrificing its extensive landscaped setting on the shores of Lake Michigan, which abutted the campus immediately to the east. The solution was characteristically radical for the period. It was decided that the university would purchase 152 acres of land beneath Lake Michigan from the State of Illinois, in order to create an artificial headland called the Lakefill Project.

The Lakefill Project would serve to reorient the campus, which historically had addressed the land-side as seen from the city, in the direction of the lake, opening up prospects out to the horizon, therefore giving the university a new frontage. The project was led by Walter Netsch of SOM, architect of the UIC Campus, who oversaw the land engineering project and was commissioned for a number of new buildings in both the city site of the campus and on the newly created site on the Lakefill. Netsch’s masterplan for the campus extension initially overlaid the city grid onto the newly-reclaimed landscape, proposing a series of raised platforms and precincts which would meld into a more fluid landscape on a new lakefront esplanade. The finalised plan as built introduced an inlet of Lake Michigan within the scheme, to form a lake-within-the-lake. The two views above are taken from the artificial dam which separates Lake Michigan from the lagoon, looking out to the Lake and the city on the horizon, and looking in to the Lagoon and the campus. The curvature of the artificial lake counterposes the rectilinearity of the proposed building clusters. This more benign lagoon ensures that the relationship between the original campus and the lake - and therefore the university’s image as a lakeshore campus - remains integral to its identity.

As for the remaining footprint of the Lakefill, Netsch apportioned the land to distribute new building precincts around a generous landscaped park. Pinwheel clusters of buildings characteristic of Netsch provided localised centres within the campus extension, forming smaller nodes within the overall campus plan. This thinking was apparently to post-rationalise the more haphazard arrangement of buildings of the neo-gothic campus in a more legible arrangement of clusters, each of which could be individuated so as to retain a particular style, without compromising the unity of the campus as a whole. This scheme aimed to integrate plurality and unity - e pluribus unum.

The second building to be designed by Netsch has the most immediate relationship to Evanston of any Northwestern University buildings; the Rebecca Crown Center (RCC) was designed to consolidate the university’s main administration. Located inland at the head of Orrington Avenue, which the City truncated to create the site for the new administrative centre, the centre and its distinctive campanile are visible from the main square in Evanston, terminating the view along the avenue. The axis of the avenue is continued into the site wherein it bifurcates from an elevated central quadrangle, known informally as the Sandbox, opening up multiple routes into the campus. From the elevated quad, a pinwheel organisation of routes through cloistered walkways direct movement between the city and campus, acting as a filter between the two domains. Three main buildings linked by a covered colonnade enclose the quad, with its fourth corner anchored in by the campanile. The traditional connotations of the quad type are subverted by the pinwheel arrangement, which gives the impression of building masses which shift and react to the mobile observer in the space, opening up views of the landscape beyond through the open colonnade.

Architecturally, the RCC melds the pre-existing neo-gothic architecture of the Northwestern University Campus with Netsch’s brutalism. Heavily-articulated tectonic elements create deep relief and a highly modelled facade with elements which resemble finials and flying brise-soleil. The repetitive vertically-emphasised elements which order the facade in sandy masonry tones evoke the vertical emphasis of the perpendicular style, revealing an affiliation between the neo-gothic campus and the new brutalist language of the RCC. Changes in level are accommodated within the colonnade zone, and double up as sheltered seating areas creating an undercrofted circulation and assembly area for the administration centre. The colonnade acts as the filter between the elevated quad of the RCC and the landscaped campus beyond, forming a route from the city to the main lake-side area of the campus.

Within the lake-side area of the campus, a number of Netsch's buildings form pavilions in the landscape, interspersed amongst existing neo-gothic buildings and atop the new Lakefill grade. Nested amongst a series of neo-classical and neo-gothic pavilions in the landscape of the main campus, Netsch’s largest complex reworks ideas from the RCC to align with his evolving ‘field theory’. The Northwestern University Library bears traces of the organisation of the RCC but develops the architectural concept of interconnected blocks on a pinwheel using a diagonal and rotational logic. Fundamentally, in massing terms, both the RCC and library complexes comprise three large rectangular buildings around a central precinct with a connecting colonnade or corridor.

The library precinct is an extension to the existing Deering Library, but instead of a singular building extension instead it is composed of three ‘towers’ or blocks raised over a service plinth. Each tower is linked by a diagonal corridor axis raised over the plinth; at the convergence of all three corridors, a vertical core tower manages circulation between the service sub-level and each block whilst housing a cafe at plinth level. Similar in respects to the RCC, the Library sits atop the plinth and acts as an elevated quad, accessible from all directions through undercrofts which link respective buildings. Also arranged as a pinwheel around a quad, the library introduces a rotational ‘field theory’ to each one of the towers.

Netsch’s ‘field theory’ which developed simultaneously with the library involved the rotation of one form within another as a mode of formal and spatial composition. This nascent theory was applied to each tower at the library. Netsch took each square in plan and rotated it about its centre to array its external corners. Within the library, this rotation is apparent in the sunken reading room rotunda at the centre of each tower, from which columns radiate outwards to manifest the field theory in action. By leaving the interior of the library towers largely open, the effect is most apparent of the facade, whereby the radial logic of the field theory generates the appearance of a building in rotation. Reading carrels which rotate about the facade to project out at the building corners and are jettied-out further every floor up present a conflictingly static and fortified weight combined with a dynamic and centrifugal force, creating a composition which appears frozen in movement.

Externally, the library precinct offers an open area in which to appreciate the conceptual logic of the field theory, although this effect is muted by the otherwise cold and reserved elevations whose windows are limited to slots where the carrels are jettied over the quad. The success of the space is in its porosity to the landscape around it. Processional staircases rise up to the elevated plinth level by passing beneath the diagonal masses of the corridor links overhead, the transition from amorphous landscape to the scenographic precinct presents an acutely distinct spatial experience orchestrated by the change in level, condition, and organisation. From within the precinct, the raised ground floor of each tower enables views through the field of columns to the landscape and lakes beyond, yet the sense of enclosure is salient.

In both Netsch’s major architectural projects for Northwestern, the external-space-within is charged by enclosing outdoor ‘rooms’ with a dynamic formal envelope. In the case of the RCC, the pinwheel plan organisation orients the user to areas beyond the colonnade, which acts as a filter between city and campus. In the case of the Library precinct, diagonal and rotational forms suggest motion itself, yet their organisation in plan nevertheless centres on the external quad between the main library towers. In the RCC and Library project, the division of programme into separate yet interrelated buildings enables the creation of a central quad which gives back to the space of the campus and the city - encouraging movement beyond the intramural limit of the isolated building.

Case Study - IIT

Illinois Institute of Technology

Chicago, USA

Situated due south of Chicago centre, the campus of the Illinois Institute of Technology is one of the most complete and emblematic campus environments of the 20th Century. Product of the architect Mies van der Rohe, who directed the department of architecture after the closure of the Bauhaus, the IIT Campus was a lesson in the the architect’s own theory of ‘universal space’ and Miesian urbanism.

IIT is located on State Street, a main street which forms a linear axis from the city to the campus, extending the universal Chicago grid southbound to superimpose an invisible order over the site. The campus site along major infrastructure routes into the city had been designated a ‘blighted’ zone, which enabled its total redevelopment for the expanding Armour Institute, later to become Illinois Institute of Technology. Only the original building of the Armour Institute was retained, otherwise a tabula rasa condition would be imposed through the demolition of all structures over the site, which encompassed multiple city blocks, displacing existing residents to nearby housing projects. The newly levelled site, with the exception of the remaining solitary building bore no traces of a previous condition, or palimpsest, other than the vestigial grid of roads which bisected the new campus superblock.

The planning of the campus was derived from a schematic operation in which the dimension of all parts of the overall campus, major or minor, would be determined by the size of the smallest components. First, an inventory of typical furniture dimensions was collected, such as desks, workbenches, and drafting tables. Second, the furniture was arrayed according to capacity to inform the dimension of standard rooms, such as classrooms, labs, and drafting rooms. Thirdly, the standard rooms were arrayed on the grid according to a schedule of accommodation, in order to establish the basic parameters for each building. Finally, each building was sited on the planning grid and, in the initial masterplan, atypical forms such as auditoria projected out from the standard footprint to express themselves as exceptions to the rule.

This operation through the scales, working from the inside-out and from the smallest element to the largest, reflected the Miesian rationalist understanding of space, adopted from industrial architects derivation of structure from the dimensions of industrial machinery. Following the basic spatial requirements of the schematic operation, the technological order and structural grid of the campus could be extrapolated with a direct relationship to the activities which informed its properties and frequency. At the IIT Campus, the optimal structural module was identified at a 24ft square grid extended indiscriminately over the site. Rather than begin with an ideological stance apropos the idealism of the university which prevailed in postwar campus planning, the IIT Campus was planned primarily through the technological vehicle of structural and spatial planning which in itself is indifferent to the purpose of Higher Education.

This basis of space reflects the Miesian concept of universal space, which would enable freedom of use by the university and thus unlock the utopianism of the campus. This theory holds that a clear span architectural skeleton is the minimum and therefore the optimum form for accommodating changing uses throughout a buildings lifespan. While this theory finds its proper expression in column-free interiors, such as Crown Hall (the department for architecture), the spatial indeterminacy provided by a minimal tectonic armature on a grid also provided opportunity for future modification with little resistance. Whilst the 24ft grid was considered a universal device for setting-out the structural grid and layout of campus buildings, exception was made for Crown Hall, whose free plan interior reifies the theory of Universal Space. Within the hall, space is partitioned within the continuous interior to form localised pockets of activity informally enclosed by furniture-like elements.

The interior arrangement of Crown Hall is a miniature of the campus as a whole. The hall is a topology - an activated spatial field - which compresses at points of intensity and event and is rarefied in areas to form clearings within the relational space of the interior. As consequence, the interior urbanism of Crown Hall can be understood as a key through which to understand the campus as a whole: as an ordered and rhythmic field punctuated by incidental moments of compression and rarefaction, activation and dissipation. Universal space, such as the non prescriptive interior of the hall, is not so much about the extension of space as much as it is about the maximisation of potential use. The regulatory logic of the planning grid controls the hand of the architect, yet the hand of the user is free to use space as they wish.

The initial campus plan proposed two symmetrical arrangements of buildings mirrored over a transverse street (33rd), which crossed perpendicular to State Street. Two ostensibly identical rectangular buildings faced one another across a defined quadrangle bisected by 33rd Street, whilst smaller elongated building forms were shifted in plan on either side of the main buildings to enclose the sides of the quad from State Street. The mirrored plan created a balanced but static composition of buildings only enlivened by the irregular forms of the auditoria which projected into the space of the quadrangle.

As the campus planning continued in tandem with Mies’ tenure at IIT the symmetrical rigidity of the masterplan began to transform into a less formal but nevertheless balanced composition. In later iterations of the plan, as a larger site became available, the spacing and regularity of the arrangement began to loosen to favour an alternating spatial arrangement where the figure ground would flip between figure and void with a less predictable rhythm. Throughout Mies held to the grid field imposed over the site however, as specific spatial requirements for individual buildings became apparent, Mies allowed individual building footprints to extend or contract, offset by a few squares on the grid so that building forms would appear to slip past one another. While maintaining the logic of the grid inherent to both the internal organisation of the campus and the city equally, the internal logic of each piece of the campus puzzle revitalised the grid which had stultified space in the city.

The more the masterplan deviated from the symmetry of the original plan, the more rhythmic the relationships between landscape and between buildings became. Buildings were prised apart, and space which was initially bounded and firmly enclosed was extended to segue from one quadrangle to the next through their open corners. Marginal overlap between buildings gave a semblance of the archetypal academic quadrangle, yet the prairie like expanse and diagonal views between buildings diminished the static formality of the plan. The final campus plan as built has an open grid form where space floods around the campus building, whose interrelationship resembles boats moored in a harbour than firmly locked buildings on a campus. Forms which drift past each other pinch space and create a relational value which reaffirms a cohesive campus quality, yet simultaneously drift apart so that some buildings appear like marooned ships in a sea of space.

The most surprising absence at the IIT Campus is that of a physical boundary to the estate. Where other campuses define the extent of the academic enclave through wall, change in condition, or building arrangement, the IIT Campus is open to its environs, rendering it a porous environment and suggesting the extension of its spatial field. Indeed, the conscious extension, or proliferation of Miesian urbanism trialled at the campus can be found in localised moments within the city proper. The spatial arrangement of buildings which are offset in plan to create diagonal rather than strictly parallel alignment would characterise Miesian projects in Chicago. From municipal precincts and plazas, to residential tower complexes, to commercial building clusters, the informal slipped plan transposed the spatiality of the campus to the city manifesting a different kind of universal space.

The planning of the IIT Campus was more than a mere operation in space planning, but a manifesto in how the grid of the American city could evolve to activate the orthogonal space of the grid with oblique movement and dissolution of a hard street edge. The campus internalised the city grid but in the place of rigid geometries which defined a hard street edge, open space was allowed to permeate the campus superblock to equate landscape to architecture. For Mies, IIT was a lesson in how campus planning could reform city planning in a test environment, which he later implemented in many urban schemes in Chicago proper. By adhering to the city’s cardinal grid, and deconstructing its totalising properties, Mies demonstrated how simple deformations on a plan could substitute formal axiality of the American street for the diagonal movement across a city block, how unrelenting linearity could be substituted for the liquid qualities of space, and how the metronomic rhythm of the isotropic street grid could be syncopated through spatial compression and release.

Case Study - UIC

University of Illinois at Chicago

Chicago, USA

The University of Illinois at Chicago, UIC, represents a counterpoint to the New Universities in England studied in this thesis. On face value, the Plateglass (New) Universities and UIC are ideologically similar: in both instances the campuses are miniature urban structures newly built in the postwar period to provide a higher education to a populace whose access to university education had been historically withheld. In the case of UIC, the stated objective of the university was to provide higher education to the ‘urban proletariat’, sharing the English Plateglass mission of democratising access to university. However similarities between the respective missions of the universities across the Atlantic are largely a product of a global trend towards improving access to higher education, and the differences in approach between newly founded English universities and American universities reside primarily in their extramural condition and relationship to a host city.

In contrast to the English New Universities, UIC and other Chicago institutions of higher education sited their campuses within an urban environment. Nevertheless sharing the utopianism of their English counterparts, UIC and its contemporaries proposed radical urban renewal projects in the city. The campus for the University of Illinois at Chicago would be designed idealistically as an ‘academic oasis in the center of a great city’. If Chicago is known by the mantra urbs in horto, ie. city in a garden, the campus would invert that condition in creating a garden in the city, hortus in urbe. Throughout its development, the architect’s plans for the campus preferred a high-density complex of buildings which would reserve large areas of land for lawns, courts and groves between compact building clusters and standalone towers. Reading this proposition as a question of landscape urbanism, the UIC Campus posits an alternative form of city design than the unrelenting isotropic grid of the Chicago Loop.

The design of the campus was led by Walter Netsch of SOM, already recognised for his designs for the US Air Force Academy Campus, whose layout of buildings organised by a grid of vast parade grounds and raised platforms set the tone for the UIC Campus. Initial proposals for the campus largely internalise the existing city grid which is superimposed over every parcel of land stretching from the city centre to beyond the city limits. The campus adopts the grid as an organisational device ubiquitous in Chicago, however it deforms its totalising qualities by using it as an invisible matrix on which individual buildings could be selectively shifted, rotated and re-arranaged. In contrast to the city grid, the campus grid is non-deterministic, using it as a compositional framework to modify space in order to create diagonal axes and pinwheel layouts which have an inherently dynamic spatial condition. From an aerial perspective, both campus and city conform to the logic of the grid, however the experience on the ground is markedly different; at UIC, the grid is merely a setting-out instrument rather than its spatial representation. As such, the campus relates to the city, but suggests an alternative use of its all-encompassing frameworks which privileges open space and landscape, rather than the maximum exploitation of the grid.

Despite the orthogonal logic of the grid, Netsch likened the concept behind the UIC campus to a ‘drop of water scheme’ where the campus would be organised by a set of rings radiating from the campus centre at Circle Forum. Like the plan of the Loop - Chicago’s concentric loops which emanate from the city centre - the UIC Campus would gradate from dense, dispersed, to landscaped conditions in a reflection of the real urban condition through the virtual urbanity of the campus. This manifested architecturally in a pinwheel scheme ordered by the processional routes and platforms which traversed the campus. Raised over an undulating landscape scheme, the platforms provided an immense network of elevated pedestrian concourses which integrated all the main campus buildings, providing direct access at first floor level. Perhaps the most powerful image of the campus is fostered by these aerial walkways, whose significance in integrating the entire campus by a network of raised pedways, was lost with their demolition. Today, the concentricity of the campus idea is supplanted by a more traditional sense of a campus whereby standalone buildings cohere into a campus-whole by their consistent relationship to a landscape.

Echoes of the lost platform system remain on the campus, which is now experienced primarily from the ground level. Terraces and loggia which once received the bridges between buildings remain today as a testament to a humanistic idea to elevate pedestrian movement on the campus. The raised platform system converged on the Circle Forum of the campus, which centred on the locus of Netsch’s ‘drop of water’; here, an immense plaza was punctuated by amphitheatres, and seating apses which would concentrate student life on a great elevated plane. Beneath the forum plaza, amongst a great hypostyle of columns, lecture centres orchestrated the flow of students in and out of ‘teletoria’, which pioneered AV lectures for a modern society. Where the immensity of the Circle Forum charged the life of the university in a condenser of intensity, more intimate spaces could be found in the casual clusters of low rise buildings in the next ring out. The formality of the Forum dissolved amongst the clustered networks of teaching buildings dispersed within the landscape, which remain today and provide a loose structure and defined boundaries to the landscaped lawns between. This duality of immensity and intimacy, mediated through the architecture of the campus, served to enable the individuation of the student within the mass environment of the university, by providing small and large spatial units which would assist their assimilation into a greater social entity. The campus was designed to be at once ‘compact and capacious’, fostering ideas of nested communities within the university.

Initial campus buildings were designed according to the grid system, in which monumental rectangular forms were distributed amongst the landscape. In this ordering logic, the irregularity of the spaces between regular buildings would provide the spatial dynamism which supports the vitality of the academic community. This logic gave way in later phases of the campus development to Netsch’s own Field Theory. Under this theory spatial dynamism could be generated by a simple architectural manipulation of rotating square forms in plan within themselves, in order to establish orthogonal and diagonal orientation within buildings. Simply described as a 45 degree rule, Field Theory substituted the urban irregularity of dynamic spaces between buildings for the architectural irregularity of dynamic spaces within buildings. The formality and monumentality of early UIC buildings segued into the rotating and angular organisation of later buildings, most notable is the Science and Engineering South building, whose undercroft assembles students and orchestrates movement from many approach directions and levels in a more dynamic fashion than the orthogonal arrangement of early campus buildings. The rotational logic of Netsch's theory is manifested in the splayed beams on the soffit of the undercroft. Situated further out from the campus core due to their later development, the field theory buildings demonstrate a point where the grid logic of the campus centre disintegrates towards the campus edges.

In the initial plans, expansion of the campus could be easily accommodated by the extension of the pedestrian concourses on their axis, whereby further academic clusters would be appended onto the elevated platforms as necessary. This establishes a consistent architectural and spatial order managed through an infrastructural system (pedestrian concourse) and architectural system (building clusters). Evidenced by sympathetic later phases, this logic of a repetitive spatial module able to be adapted to changing architectural fashions ensures a cohesive quality at the UIC Campus. For instance, three new glazed halls were added using an identical module dimension and footprint to an original cluster. The material difference is accepted by the campus due to its compatible urban structure, rather than an obsequious replication of the architecture of the original. On an architectural level, individuation within a mass environment was achieved by this tectonic and organisation framework capable of accommodating site specificity within a general masterplan.

The overall coherence of the University of Illinois at Chicago, although significantly diminished by the demolition of the multi-level platform system, still retains a resilient unity of parts to the whole, demonstrated by its capacity to absorb new additions and architectural concepts. In part through a considered landscape scheme, the dispersal and concentration of buildings around points of intensity is integrated under a common treatment of the landscape. This conceptual environment of the campus was designed to embed landscape in the city, and reform the city grid to privilege the pedestrian. The belief of the architects and planners in this system led to the conception of schemes such as UIC as not merely a ‘piece of the new city; it was the new city’. The campus was promoted by political leaders as a model for urban development outside of the limits of the university, in promoting an alternative to the existing organisation of the American city. In the United States, more so than in England, city planning and campus planning reciprocate to the extent that exemplars of the latter were considered prototypes for the former. This fulfils the potentiality of the urban university, as an environment capable of positing alternative forms of urban renewal beyond the confines of the campus.