Lovers nuzzle. People people-watch. Friends stop and schmooze. Students kick back in the crisp fall air, pretending to pore over books.
A river of humanity runs through the renovated campus core of the University of Illinois at Chicago. And to anyone familiar with the masonry moonscape it used to be, the change is nothing short of astonishing.
For a mere $7.1 million, or roughly what it takes these days to build a mansion for a basketball superstar, Chicago architect Daniel Coffey has given the taxpayers of Illinois their money’s worth–and one of the liveliest public spaces in Chicago.
Though the renovation succeeds more as urban design than architecture, it has been carried out with such loving attention to the pedestrian that every designer bent on egotistical form-making should be required to learn its humanistic lessons.
To appreciate what Coffey has pulled off, it helps to picture what the campus core once looked like and to understand the anti-urban set of ideas that led architecture critic M.W. Newman to dub it, shortly after its 1965 opening, “Fortress Illini.”
Laid out by Walter Netsch, now retired from the Chicago architectural firm of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, the campus walled itself off from the Chicago street grid and neighborhoods around it. Its very name–University of Illinois at Chicago Circle, taken from the highway “spaghetti bowl” just west of downtown–indicated its kinship with the expressways then laying waste to city neighborhoods.
That kinship extended beyond the campus name, changed in 1982 to UIC. A key aspect of the design was a system of elevated walkways Netsch intended as expressways for pedestrians, their 16-ton granite slabs allowing those in a hurry to bypass crowded, ground-level sidewalks below.
A massive concrete deck at the meeting of the walkways was the campus’ other distinguishing feature. With a central amphitheater and four smaller circular seating areas, it also functioned as a common roof for six lecture halls beneath it. Surrounding it were buildings faced in concrete and coarsely surfaced aggregate, which gave the campus a brutal appearance in vogue among architects in the 1960s.
It was a heroic vision and, ultimately, a tragic one, though Netsch has insisted that its demise resulted less from faulty design than from poor maintenance and shifting demographics (he planned the elevated walkways for a campus projected to have 32,000 students rather than the 24,589 it has today).
The walkways leaked year-round, spilling rainwater and melting snow onto the heads of those beneath them. With its forest of concrete columns holding up the walkways’ heavy slabs, the lower level was as dark and fear-inducing as Lower Wacker Drive. The windswept central area turned out to be as inhospitable to pedestrians as an aircraft carrier flight deck. University officials closed it for much of the academic year because snow and ice made it unsafe.
Intended to bring the campus together, the design wound up dividing it. In 1992, university administrators decided that enough was enough and that the original design–at once ugly, ill-used and a drag on student recruiting–had to go. Today, that decision seems fully justified by the contrast between “before” and “after.”
The “before,” still evident in unchanged portions of the campus, is a vision of urban anomie, best suited to skateboarders who enjoy its resemblance to the 21st Century Los Angeles depicted in the movie “Blade Runner”–mist and fog swirling about mammoth structures built atop the city’s ruins.
But at its revamped core, UIC is a place transformed, a change that emanates from a rejection of modern urbanism and a return to a traditional way of making cities. In essence, it holds that the spaces buildings shape are more important than the buildings themselves.
Coffey already has put the approach to good use in converting the old Goldblatt’s store on State Street into the hub of DePaul University’s downtown campus. Fronting the building’s Jackson Boulevard entrance is a lively little plaza with niche-like seating areas; it rolls out an urban welcome mat for everyone from office workers to the occasional homeless person.
At UIC, Coffey has shaped a whole new urban room, not just a welcome mat–a big but intimate space that is gloriously open to the sky and even more gloriously teeming with people.
The old deck is gone, as are the amphitheater at its center, the elevated walkways and their supporting columns from Harrison Street on the north almost as far as Taylor Street on the south. But Coffey’s task was more complex than tearing down the old and building something, anything, new. It involved a series of moves–some obvious, some subtle–that invite people to feel comfortable in the plaza.
Take the new peaked roofs atop the lecture halls. Not only do they enhance the view of those buildings from above (an important feature when nearby campus structures rise as tall as 28 stories), but they also “pin down the corners” of the plaza, as Coffey puts it, making it seem more like a sheltered space than an unprotected piece of urban tundra.
Another little-noticed change: Netsch’s elevated walkways forced people to enter the central deck along one of four routes, all at right angles to the deck. The new arrangement allows students and faculty to come at the campus core from six ways, four of them diagonals. That energizes the plaza because people can cut across it, something that was difficult to do with an amphitheater in the middle.
Coffey further humanized the space by breaking down its scale with a grid pattern that runs across the plaza’s precast concrete pavement; its six shades (white, black, two grays and two tans) introduce a variety of color into the once drab space.
Equally important are the almost invisible layers of space the architect created within the plaza’s rectangular space. The curving borders of six seating areas frame an ellipse within the rectangle that accentuates the plaza’s east-west axis. Each of those areas has three steps rising from ground level. Collectively, they create the illusion that the plaza’s floor descends from them, like a sunken living room, where people invariably want to sit and talk. New trees and light fixtures with ornamental tops create additional layers of space along the ellipse’s edge.
Coffey has designed the seating areas so people can be part of the plaza’s action. The seating areas themselves are wheelchair accessible and have comfortable teak seats with a silvery shading that blends well with the gray-toned pavement. Ample lighting seems to make people feel safe.
All this renders the plaza a true social center instead of an expressway ramp for pedestrians. It is now, in the lingo of architects, a destination space as well as a through space.
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The space continues to evolve, entwining itself in campus daily life. An impromptu rock concert played out the other day on the plaza’s stage-like southern end.
One thing the plaza needs is the 70-foot clock tower Coffey planned for the plaza’s north end, but could not build because of budget. The clock would add sound variety to the plaza’s visual variety and would provide a vertical form to declare the plaza’s presence to those outside it.
There are other things to quibble about. Though the curving roofs of the smaller halls nicely echo the space’s ellipse, for example, they nonetheless face the plaza with blank walls that are like clumsy backsides, not graceful fronts.
But the shortcomings of this space ultimately have to do with the way it relates to Netsch’s design, neither blending seamlessly with it nor posing a provocative contrast.
His Wrightian light standards are a good example. Handsome enough with curving glass tops and slender concrete posts, they nonetheless are flimsy-looking in contrast to Netsch’s muscular concrete columns. Striving to come to terms with what was there before, they’re almost too polite.
Yet that is Coffey’s way–inclusion of the past and the complexities of the present, rather than making one exclusive statement–and it has generally served him well here. One school of thought, for example, had it that the architect should create a monumental ruin out of Netsch’s columns. Coffey thought that would have trivialized the past and sensibly opted instead to incorporate Netsch’s existing columns within the renovated lecture halls. There, past does fuse with present, even if the revamp does not fully achieve Coffey’s goal of looking as though it were always there.
But what design could have done that and still served its users, given the spirit-crushing brutalism that preceded it?
The new plaza retains UIC’s urban identity, failing to be the suburban or Urbana-Champaign green its detractors predicted. Netsch’s design looked like a Greek or Roman theater; Coffey’s transformation of it has resulted in a real urban theater, activated not by architectural form but by people.
His modest way of city-building may not win Coffey any prizes and probably won’t send graduate students beating a path to his door. Yet his role as a design doctor–emphasizing healing, not heroics–is the right tonic for what ails America’s cities.
Indeed, architects as a whole are so fixated with trendy images–and so little concerned with the people who actually use their buildings–that the photographer hired to document the remade plaza initially shot it when no students were present. In a move that sums up the spirit of this project, Coffey had him return to the campus with explicit instructions: Don’t leave the people out.