Architecture: By the Cloverleaf

The classic university campus is a grouping of quaint Gothic or red brick Georgian buildings adrift on a rolling meadow of greensward. But the exploding college population of the U.S. demands less casual and rustic solutions. In the Chicago metropolitan area alone, there are 150,000 college students. By 1980, estimates the University of Illinois, there will be 568,000 questing applicants. To meet this need, the university desperately needed a new campus, one that would be big, modern and accessible to city dwellers.

The university rejected a pasture on the city’s outskirts, fought for and got 106 downtown acres where once stood the Chicago slums that Al Capone’s gang made infamous. Planned as a commuter college without dormitories, the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle sits in the inner city—as does the Sorbonne in Paris. Within view of the Loop, the campus actually occupies the area designated by City Planner Daniel (“Make no little plan”) Burnham in 1909 as the site for Chicago’s future civic center. It is no coincidence that the campus is the first ever named for a traffic clover-leaf—the adjacent intersection of three expressways called Chicago Circle.

Slab Rendezvous. Fortunately, the man who designed the Chicago Circle campus prefers subways to taxicabs, is a champion of city living and a fancier of pop and op. He is Skidmore, Owings & Merrill’s gangling M.I.T. Grad Walter Netsch, 45, architect of the Air Force Academy’s space-frame chapel. Rather than trying to carve out grassy plots, he has opted for the tough, rapidly moving esthetics of the city. His results are what he calls a “microenvironment,” a miniature city for learning.

Netsch used the cold, durable materials of the city—concrete, granite, hard-surfaced brick—to build his university. Mindful that 28,500 students will soon swarm its halls, he barred automobiles from the campus in favor of elevated pedestrian expressways that connect the actual city outside with the academic core of the college. The crisp, die-straight expressways are bordered by stone bollards and giant chains. From the four points of the compass, these airborne paths lead to a 300-ft. by 450-ft. elevated slab, a great, raised court that has become the students’ principal rendezvous.

Undercover Parks. The geometry of ancient Greece rules this elevated plane. Four roofless exedrae, or terraced pits, provide outdoor spots for plays, lectures, flirting, and even small protest meetings. Piercing the center is one of modern architecture’s most unusual staircases: an amphitheater that descends to 21 classrooms below the flying court. The platform level gives second-story entrances to the library, laboratories and student-union building (which houses barbershops, bowling alley and rifle range).

The raised campus not only accentuates the view of a great city: it also impressively dramatizes the immense stretch of the Midwestern prairies by capitalizing on Frank Lloyd Wright’s perception that the best architectural way to capture their spirit would be in strong horizontals. The space beneath the granite and concrete court and under the elevated walkways is not wasted. In places, the platform level serves as the roof covering for campus classrooms; in others, it shelters ground-level paths from rain, and adjacent outdoor parks, cobblestoned and furnished with old-fashioned fold-up lawn chairs, from wind. There, says Architect Netsch, students can bask and study in balmy weather, as if “loafing in Paris’ Luxembourg Gardens.”

Renaissance Trickery. The buildings get larger as they spread outward from the great court. “We’ve thought of the design as being created by a drop of water,” says the architect. “The ripples are more intense in the center and broaden as the waves move out.” From lawn chairs to the 500-ft. truss that is the lintel of the laboratory building, the campus explodes in scale. Even the bricks on the walls and scattered decorative stone bases double in size to harmonize with larger facades. “It’s an old Renaissance trick,” explains Netsch.

He also borrowed from the Renaissance by erecting one dramatic vertical building to offset the massive horizontal thrust of the plan. But in raising the 28-story administration building as a sort of campanile, he also made it a showcase for structural technology. Since Netsch could take advantage of the decreasing loads the columns had to bear as the building rose, he was able to widen the floors toward the top without thickening the supports.

The campus is built to grow. Both the lab building and the library can triple their size outward from the college’s core. One pedestrian expressway points toward Netsch’s yet unbuilt art and architecture building, a multilevel, polygonal structure within which students will go from floor to floor in spiral fashion as well as by vertical stairways. Even the more massive structures that rim the campus are open to the city around them. “We use the buildings as gateways,” Netsch explains. As urban as the new subway station built to disgorge students right onto one of its walkways, the new Chicago Circle campus is a growing monument that acquires its expansive scale naturally from its monumental task—the education of new generations in the heart of urban society.