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).