http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-architecture01jun01,1,3766835.story?coll=chi-news-hed
U. of C. picks design for performing arts center
By Blair Kamin
Tribune architecture critic
Published June 1, 2007
Chicago is about to get an innovative new skyscraper, one that stretches a ground-hugging arts center into the sky and comes complete with a retractable roof and maybe even a yoga and napping room.
The University of Chicago made the plan public Thursday in announcing that its designers,
New York architects Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, have won the commission for a $100 million creative and performing arts center on the south side of the Midway Plaisance.
Best known for their American Folk Art Museum in Manhattan, the husband-and-wife team of Williams and Tsien beat four other finalists, including Daniel Libeskind, the master planner for the reconstruction of New York City's World Trade Center.
They also beat three winners of the prestigious Pritzker Architecture Prize: Japan's Fumihiko Maki, Austria's Hans Hollein and Thom Mayne of Santa Monica, Calif.
The signature element of their design is a 160-foot-tall tower, topped by a glass-walled, cantilevered cafe that would act as a beacon and serve as a modern counterpart to the university's neo-Gothic towers across the Midway.
The cafe's movable roof would let in sun and air, at least in the warm months.
The yoga and napping room was inspired by the architects' stress-relieving yoga breaks as they designed the project and their knowledge that students staying up well past midnight may require some midday shut-eye.
"They did a beautiful job of thinking of the campus as a whole," said Danielle Allen, dean of the university's humanities division and a member of the selection jury. "With them, we weren't picking a building that just stood on its own. It understood, advanced and innovated on our traditions."
Despite the praise being heaped on its design, the center will face the challenge of luring students and faculty south of the Midway, an area that has long seemed disconnected from the serene quadrangles on the north side of the U. of C.
In addition, university officials acknowledge, the center may shrink in size because it is likely to be built all at once, not in two phases, as originally contemplated.
"Our goal is to get as much of phase one and phase two into this project as $100 million will allow," said Larry Norman, the U. of C.'s deputy dean for the arts.
The center, which took a major step forward May 3 with the announcement of a $35 million gift from Chicago investment banker David Logan and his family, is proposed for a site at Ingleside Avenue and 60th Street, which forms the Midway's southern border.
On the same block are the Midway Studios, official Chicago landmarks where the sculptor Lorado Taft, creator of the "Fountain of Time" sculpture at the Midway's west end, once worked.
The center will seek to bring together students and faculty from a variety of artistic disciplines—music, theater, visual arts, and others. The plan also calls for a multipurpose performance hall and three small theaters.
Williams and Tsien envision a building that broadcasts its activities through expansive walls of glass, inviting attention from residents of Hyde Park and nearby South Side neighborhoods.
"We want to expose the mess, the activity, the vibrancy of the inside," Williams said in an interview before the university's board of trustees formally approved the selection Thursday afternoon.
This will be the first Chicago commission for the architects, who are highly-regarded modernists known for their creative use of materials and vibrant interior spaces.
Offices, studios and other facilities for each artistic discipline in the center would be grouped, with generous common areas in between.
"At night," the architects wrote in their proposal, these spaces would "glow like an illuminated bee hive."
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Copyright © 2007, Chicago Tribune
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