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.
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