Construction on Harris School’s “Keller Center” likely to commence summer 2016

Update (11/25/15):

A new rendering from Chicago Harris’s website shows a more conservative (less expensive?) adaptive reuse design. I’m still a fan!

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For some years, the Harris School of Public Policy has been planning a move to the Edward Durell Stone-designed New Graduate Residence Hall (“New Grad”) on 60th Street between Kimbark and Kenwood Avenues, a building which has had various uses over the years. The move was delayed by the Recession, then by several years of over-admitting* which resulted in a need for additional undergraduate housing, made more acute by the unexpected demise of Pierce Hall–a need that was met by New Grad as well as I-House. Presumably it was also delayed by the search for more big donors. This search was concluded by late 2014, when the University announced that Dennis Keller (who built a for-profit education empire with DeVry) would give $20 million to Harris, and that King Harris, after whose uncle the school is named, would give $12.5 million.

These donations, coupled with today’s announcement of a staggering $100 million gift to Chicago Harris from The Pearson Family Foundation to form a new institute to study global conflicts, which gives new urgency for the Harris School’s expansion into a larger and more prominent facility, mean that work on the “Keller Center,” as the remodeled (“adaptive reuse”) building will be called, will surely begin soon. By “soon,” I don’t mean that soon. As soon as students move out in June of 2016, assuming that Campus North (my coverage here) is on schedule and ready to house students in September of 2016.

http://photoarchive.lib.uchicago.edu/

http://photoarchive.lib.uchicago.edu/

http://photoarchive.lib.uchicago.edu/

The Edward Durell Stone building always posed a challenge for the University, since it is not the architect’s best work and yet it is an important example of 1960s modern architecture on campus by one of the movement’s leading practitioners. Preliminary renderings of the Keller Center show the addition of a minimalist glass box fourth floor and a grand, sparkling new entrance. There’s also a cool basement thing which opens up almost onto the sidewalk on the building’s northwest corner (the corner that students and faculty would most regularly walk by). By making the facade and roofline more dynamic, and by using glass to break up and minimize New Grad’s monotonous exterior use of concrete, the proposed design improves the building without being unfaithful to the original style. The added height serves another important purpose: making Harris more visible from the other side of the Midway, which corresponds to bolstering Harris’s (metaphorical) visibility at the University and in the world. (Keller compared the School to an “underburnished” jewel.) Note also the Miesian touch–the “structural” steel beams that separate the glass walls protrude slightly above the roofline, a possible reference to his SSA Building several blocks to the west. Icing on the cake: because the new entrance is off-center, the gorgeous Mad Men-y lobby and faux-marble ceiling (see above) can maybe be preserved.

(All images owned by the University of Chicago)

Obviously the final design could end up being completely different from the design seen above. Here is what we know about the project: Frequent UChicago contractor Mortenson will be responsible for the building’s construction. The sustainability-focused firm Farr Associates, who worked with the University on Harper Court, will be a partner on the project. The lead architect has not been announced but probably has been chosen. The design looks like a bit like Renzo Piano. Renzo Piano makes sense aesthetically, since he shares Stone’s love of thin columns supporting flat cantilevered roofs (see Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the US Embassy in India). But as long as we’re speculating, given Piano’s fees and that it’s mostly not new construction, it’s more likely to be a design by Ann Beha Architects (whose Saieh Hall was an instant hit).

By the way, at one point the University evidently was considering updating Harris School’s current building. Thank goodness they reconsidered, because the plans I found online are disastrous.

*The over-admitting of the Classes of 2015 and 2016 was a source of some debate and rumors at the time. In my reckoning, Admissions was caught off guard by a dramatic increase in yield rates despite the Office’s hardly conservative modeling. Others have speculated that it was strategic, a way to increase the student body size of the College without announcing what would be a controversial desire to do so.

The Rubenstein Forum and South Campus planning

Update: The University selected Diller Scofidio + Renfro. This firm has been involved in many high-profile projects recently, including the MoMA, the High Line, the Broad Museum in Los Angeles, and major new buildings for Columbia and Stanford. The building will be the firm’s first in Chicago.

A new building south of the Midway, on 60th Street and S. Woodlawn Avenue, is planned for completion in 2018 on the empty site (brick walkups used for faculty housing were demolished in 2013). Across Woodlawn it faces the current Harris School building and it shares the block with the Modernist Charles Stewart Mott Building, an office building.

It will be called the Rubenstein Forum after billionaire donor David M. Rubenstein, of The Carlyle Group fame. The University’s news release from October announcing the donation was vague about what purpose the building will serve: supposedly it will be “an innovative facility designed to foster convening and collaboration and to serve as a physical hub for a broad array of University activities,” such as academic conferences. To me it is not quite clear why this building is “much needed,” as President Zimmer says. However, who can complain if a benefactor wants to give an unspecified but doubtless hefty sum for a new building?

This building, moreover, presents a perfect opportunity to expand Neo-Gothic architecture south of the Midway. Only one building, a dormitory, was built by the University south of the Midway in the period when the University was still fully committed to the Gothic style: Burton-Judson Courts aka BJ (Zantzinger, Borie & Medary, 1931). Another building, Chapin Hall (known as the Merriam Center until the 1980s), was built in 1938 by the successor firm Zantzinger & Borie with funding from the Rockefeller Foundation for a number of institutions related to public administration such as the American Planning Association which chose this location to benefit from a proximity to University researchers. (This arrangement was not unique–the American Meat Institute and the ABA whose old headquarters is now the Harris School also chose to locate themselves at the University of Chicago.) Other than these two buildings, there are no classic limestone, red-roofed Neo-Gothic structures on 60th Street to mirror the buildings on the Midway’s north “street wall.” The Press building (Booth Hansen Architects, 2000) is in an updated “postmodern” structure with Gothic features made of limestone. Counting this building, which is on the fringe of campus and in a quite different style, you have only three Neo-Gothic buildings on 60th Street compared to eleven along 59th Street. And the two 1930s buildings are separated by four full city blocks.

My proposal then is for a realistic Neo-Gothic building with the traditional red terra cotta tile roof. At the very least, an updated style of Neo-Gothic limestone building such as that exemplified by the Knapp Medical Research Building / Donnelly Biological Sciences Learning Center (Stubbins Associates, 1994) should be chosen. The major problems are that it is both expensive and passé to do this kind of thing. But there are firms still doing it. The obvious choice would be Thomas H. Beeby’s firm, HBRA Architects, which did exactly the same thing I want done here when they built this addition to the Oriental Institute in 1998. Another option would be David M. Schwarz whose 2001 Yale Class of ’54 Environmental Science Center is also classic Neo-Gothic. My rationale is to to make 60th Street cohere better with the rest of campus. In particular, if you add another strip of red roofing from a distance the eye will “connect” BJ and Chapin Hall with each other and you will get an (interrupted) version of the impression of a unified “facade” (a so-called “street wall”) created by the 59th Street buildings. (Note: If you put red terra cotta tiles on the Press building that might also be nice, but is not necessary.) This picture shows what I mean by “unified facade” and “street wall”:

My general goal is not new. The University has for most of its history tried to link 60th Street architecturally with the 59th Street “facade.” When the campus began to expand south of the Midway, Eero Saarinen’s Laird Bell Law Quadrangle, and even the Mott Building (Schmidt, Garden & Erikson), built in 1960 and 1959 respectively, framed their glassy facades in limestone. This initial impetus for harmony was discarded a few years later by fellow Modernists Mies van der Rohe and Edward Durell Stone, whose respective School of Social Service Administration building and New Graduate Residence Hall paid no attention to the rest of the campus’s architecture. (Fortunately, Mies’s building, though not Stone’s, is so elegant and such an outstanding example of his style that it is a net positive for the campus.) But the Press building brought back the Gothic style. And Renee Granville-Grossman Residential Commons, while modern in style, used limestone and based its shape off of BJ’s. The tower of the limestone Logan Center (Tod William Billie Tsien Architects, 2012) alludes to Rockefeller Chapel and the Harper Library towers.