(2 of 2)
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.