Medidas establecidas

2.92 Cobb Gate, University of Chicago

Photo: Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library

U N I V E R S I T Y O F C H I C A G O

World’s Exposition, then in its planning stages. The university was envisaged as a modern research university that merged an English-style undergraduate college with a German-English-style graduate research institute. Its complex programme necessitated a diverse array of teaching rooms, laboratories, dormitories, a library, and gymnasium.

The diversity of its curriculum occasioned the need for heightened unity and systematized expansion within its physical environment to ensure that it fostered a collegiate coherence. The university’s trustees thus determined that their new establishment needed a strong master plan and that within this plan, its buildings were ‘to stand as the expression of a great University’.¹²⁷

The man employed to incarnate this vision was Henry Ives Cobb.

His 1893 plan structured the university around seven quadrangles, known as the Main Quadrangles, built onto four city blocks unbroken by through roads (Figure 1.34). Its layout reflected the urban setting of the university, where the city grid iron met the Chicago park system. In their rectilinearity, the courts echoed not the organic, ad hoc English medieval quadrangles, but the Chicago grid into which they have been inserted. Yet in framing a series of lawned chambers through which green spaces flow, the Chicago quadrangles provided a continuation of the parks that surround it.¹²⁸

Cobb’s plan physically embodied the pedagogic philosophy of the university. It contained residential quadrangles, a chapel, administration building, library, museums, laboratories, small teaching classrooms and relatively few large lecture theatres. While the women’s dormitories formed the eastern façade of the Main Quadrangles, the men’s residences formed the western. The first buildings to be erected, Goodspeed, Gates, Blake and Cobb Halls, created a long, fortress-like western boundary to the outside world. Initial building focused not on the centre but on the perimeters of the campus, immediately demarcating the university’s enclave and stressing its aloofness from its mercantile setting. In so doing, the university began its life by establishing itself as a place apart. This persona of scholarly retreat was enforced by the choice of architecture.

Cobb first proposed that the architecture should employ Romanesque Revival style, but this was quickly dismissed for one that carried with it the most compelling connotations of learning – the Gothic. With its lofty connotations of permanence, truth and erudition, the Gothic appeared as the superior route to the creation

of a distinct intellectual realm in the midst of industrial Chicago. On a limited budget, Cobb designed a repertoire of functional buildings enlivened by a simple scattering of medieval devices, such as pointed arches, oriel windows, pinnacles and turreted towers. Their simple, chaste elegance was to set the tone for the campus and foster unification in the face of the college’s disconcerting complexity.

Stylistically consistent, safe from the vagaries of individual donors, the Gothic Revival vocabulary prevailed within the Main Quadrangles, forging for the university a trenchant identity within only ten years of its founding.¹²⁹

Cobb’s scholastic wonderland is entered from the north, via Cobb Gate (1900) (Figure 2.92). The Indiana limestone gate is best known for the grotesques that perch along its steep gable and which have come to occupy an entrenched place within university myth. Its dragon-like predators have come to be mythicized as admissions officers; the nervous, rodent-like creatures are overwrought first-year students; while the imperious winged griffon atop its apex symbolizes a fourth-year student, glorying in his position at the pinnacle of the social hierarchy. Such unique gestures, embedded within student lore, create the illusive quality that anchors a place in the memory.

Its steep red-tile canopy established a kinship with the pitched roofs of the buildings around Hull Court, directly inside the entryway. Hull Court (1897), the central northern quadrangle, is bounded by four buildings, the Zoology Building, Anatomy Building, Culver Hall and Erman (or Botany) Hall. Although similar in massings, the four edifices differed in their decorative detail to contrive the random asymmetry of medieval buildings risen over time.¹³⁰

To the east of Hull Court is Hutchinson Court (1903), which was designed by the rising stars of the architectural world, the Boston firm of Shepley, Rutan and Coolidge, who replaced Cobb in 1901. Charles Coolidge, the lead architect of the project, followed Cobb’s lead in many ways, adhering to the materials and general style of the earliest quadrangles. Nevertheless, Hutchinson Court espouses a different aesthetic to its neighbour, conditioned by the changing circumstances of the university. Rockefeller’s endowments were becoming ever more generous, allowing Coolidge a financial laxity that Cobb did not benefit from. The court’s buildings – Hutchinson Commons, Mitchell Tower, Reynolds Club and Mandel Hall – evidenced a new stylistic current, as Cobb’s economic Gothic Revival was displaced by

ornamental Collegiate Gothic. The university took satisfaction that its buildings made specific reference to structures of the University of Oxford. Hutchinson Commons is modelled after the sixteenth-century Christ Church Hall, the Reynolds Club after St John’s College, and Mitchell Tower after the bell tower of Magdalen College (1509).

Coolidge did not merely reproduce the Oxonian models, though;

rather he thoughtfully and imaginatively revised the medieval forms to respond to the demands of the individual project. Thus, the crocketed finials of Magdalen Tower were replaced on its Chicago counterpart with octagonal turrets to harmonize with the towers of Cobb’s Ryerson Laboratories on the opposite side of the court. With its picturesque and stimulating enclosing ranges, the quadrangle is ranked amongst the best in the central complex. ¹³¹

As vital to the character of the Main Quadrangles as their buildings is the landscape they enclose. The landscaping to this day largely follows a plan prepared by the Olmsted Brothers in 1902, which prescribed a formal, rectilinear layout. John C. Olmsted proposed a network of roadways and walkways to allow the movement of

pedestrians, supplies and waste across campus laid out upon a simple geometric system with axial vistas at each end. Hutchinson Court was designed as a sunken grassed space, ringed by a drive and single row of trees and spanned by diagonal paths. Harper Court, the central south quadrangle, was structured around clearly defined walkways and drives that provided a logical sequence of access routes, while its planting evidenced a special concern not to block axial vistas or sunlight from buildings.¹³²

Harper Court was the centrepiece of Coolidge’s humanities and social sciences complex, designed around the impressive William Rainey Harper Memorial Library (1912). The vast, highly elaborate Collegiate Gothic structure formed the southern termination of the north axis of the Quadrangles composition. Its southern door, facing out towards the Midway, marked a change in the course of campus planning for, up to then, entrance to campus had been via the more defensive, reserved means of gates.

As development proceeded in the twentieth century, Cobb’s design continued to hold sway. The East Campus to the east of the 2.93 Rockefeller Memorial Chapel

Photo: ©Michele Falzone/JAI/Corbis

2.94 Law School, University of Chicago

Photo: Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library

U N I V E R S I T Y O F C H I C A G O

Quadrangles arose largely in the 1920s, to be dominated by Bertram Goodhue’s Rockefeller Memorial Chapel (1928) (Figure 2.93). Its 63-metre tall silhouette dominates the university’s skyline. Goodhue was at the peak of his fame as America’s foremost architect of Gothic Revivalist churches, but the Rockefeller Chapel was also markedly modern in style. Sleek, angular planes and simplified geometry were synthesized with a tableau of filled niches and intricate tracery. Seven decades on, the hybridized mode was employed on East Campus at Rafael Viñoly’s Graduate School of Business (2004). Tubular steel arches carrying a spectacular vaulted glass ceiling referred to the campus’s neo-Gothic heritage, while externally the building’s strong horizontality and interlocking cubes clad in smooth limestone placed it firmly in a twenty-first-century context.¹³³

The South Campus was largely the result of post-Second World War development, on land south of the Midway. In 1955 renowned Modernist, Eero Saarinen, was commissioned to produce a master plan. Saarinen was sorely dissatisfied at what he perceived as the disregard for integrating modernist design with earlier styles, especially on college campuses. At a time when revivalist architecture was reviled as impractical and unfashionable, his plan emphasized the importance of maintaining the architectural integrity of the Gothic core, and stipulated that contemporary design should not infiltrate into the Gothic superblock. In the second half of the twentieth century, though, the university simply did not have the funds to replicate the masterworks of Cobb and Coolidge, so in the 1950s and 1960s much-needed expansion largely assumed contemporary forms lining the Midway’s southern edge. Regrettably, much of Saarinen’s plan remained unrealized. What was completed, however, was his Laird Bell Law Quadrangle (1959) directly south of the Main Quadrangles on the opposite side of the Midway.¹³⁴

Saarinen’s Law School is a four building complex, dominated by a six-storey library and office building, massed around an open court with reflecting pool which separates it from the Midway (Figure 2.94).

It is connected at the west to the Gothic Burton-Judson Dormitories (1931). The architect’s chief concern was to contrive a façade which would sit graciously alongside the Gothic campus without resorting to literal eclecticism. Transposing the thin, glass-filled walls, pinnacled outline and soaring verticality of High Gothic cathedrals, the reinforced concrete library was enclosed by a pleated, black glass curtain, which

created a serrated roofline accentuated by thin aluminium finials.

‘By stressing a small, broken scale, a lively silhouette, and especially verticality in the library design,’ Saarinen commented, ‘we intended to make it a good neighbour with the neo-Gothic dormitories.’¹³⁵ Other development on the South Campus was often less successful.

The capacious, horizontal expanse of the Midway is not a forgiving setting, and units can easily appear isolated and dwarfed. Rather than sustaining the principle of intimate, urban courtyard spaces, South Campus development proceeded along the conventional model of downtown streets circumscribed by buildings. The traditional Gothic language of the campus was, furthermore, displaced by a fervid modernism. Edward Durrell Stone’s Graduate Residence (formerly the Centre of Continuing Education, 1962) exemplified this pattern. A large, rectangular building, it has little contextual relationship with its surroundings. The lack of a common stylistic and planning approach at the South Campus is at the expense of the unifying vision of fellowship that makes the Main Quadrangles and its adjoining areas so impressive.¹³⁶

The planning and design approach of the campus became the subject of reawakened interest at the end of the 1990s. As the university reassessed the extent to which its values were expressed through its built environment, it commissioned planners Naramore, Bain, Brady and Johanson to produce the university’s third master plan. The results are still being felt on campus. A key feature of the plan is the expansion and reorganization of the North and West Campus. New structures that have arisen as part of the plan include the Gordon Centre for Integrative Science (2005) and the Max Palevsky Residential Commons (2001). These buildings fulfil important functions in allying existing buildings to form new quadrangular spaces. The Palevsky Residential Commons, for instance, designed by Ricardo Legorreta, encloses a space bounded to the south by the university’s main library, the vast Brutalist Regenstein Library (1970). Some of the new structures appropriate a modernist aesthetic, as the neon exterior of the Palevsky Residential Commons demonstrates, while others adopt a more traditional veneer. The limestone-clad Kovler Gymnasium with its carved figural sculpture and vertical fenestration adumbrates the Gothic Main Quadrangles.¹³⁷

The landscape was not forgotten in the rejuvenated campus plan. Ellis Avenue, the axis running north to south that separates

U N I V E R S I T Y O F C H I C A G O

the West Campus and Main Quadrangles, has been the subject of landscaping efforts to ensconce it as the new visual artery of the campus, bridging the science facilities to the west and the liberal arts to the east. A focus has been placed upon creating an inviting environment. The Midway Plaisance, although owned by the City of Chicago and managed by the Chicago Park District, is considered an integral part of the university’s landscape and it forms a key aspect of the school’s development plans. The organizations have co-operated with the school’s efforts to maximize the parkland’s use and render it more socially welcoming. The panel of parkland between the Main Quadrangles and the Law Quadrangle has been transformed since 2002 with an ice-skating rink and the North (2003) and South Winter Gardens (2009), which have enlivened and beautified the space for the benefit of university members and local residents.¹³⁸

The Midway provides numerous recreational opportunities not ordinarily found in an urban university. Indeed, the university is privileged to have an archipelago of peaceful outdoor spaces within the sprawling, industrial metropolis. Still valid are the remarks made in 1906 by H. G. Wells, that the university’s green spaces were ‘a wonderful contrast to the dark congestion of the mercantile city of the north’. Within the Gothic core, nature flows from the surrounding park through the ordered geometry of Cobb’s quadrangles creating a varied palette of outdoor chambers. Some courts are shaded, some are sunny, some enclosed and intimate, while others more

expansive. Linking arches draw the pedestrian from court to court, through narrow passages that burst into outdoor expanses, in a subtly artful manipulation of space that makes the campus a pleasure to navigate (Figure 2.95). For instance, in Coolidge’s Theology group (1926) in the south-west quadrangle, an enclosed, traceried cloister entices visitors through its passages until it unexpectedly reveals the dramatic and ornate façade of the Bond Chapel.

The captivating picturesqueness of the campus’s neo-Gothic heart has been a crucial factor in creating an institutional identity.

The spaces and the buildings that frame them play a crucial role in establishing a recognizable presence, or ‘brand’ image, that symbolizes the university as an entity. Vital in achieving this has been Cobb’s planning and design legacy. He created the outline for an enclosed community structured around quadrangles of consistent scale and limited architectural vocabulary. The buildings that have come to populate them are demurely elegant evocations of the Gothic idiom, which have successfully brought to the university a sense of history and permanence. Despite being erected decades apart, its buildings largely work together within the greater impress of the university.

From its earliest days, the campus strove to enfold all its various departments within a single image, and much of the campus’s effect results from the depth to which its original vision was carried out.

Although the South Campus has come under criticism for its sense of separation, the sense of collectiveness at the University of Chicago has been remarkably well preserved for an urban institution.

2.95 University of Chicago

Photo: Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library

2.96 Plan, University of Colorado at Boulder

Upon its ordination as the home of the state university in 1872, the inhabitants of Boulder were spurred into raising $15,000 to construct the University of Colorado’s first building, Old Main (1876) (Figure 2.97). Following the pattern established in colonial times, it was a large monostructure housing classrooms, library, laboratories, and accommodation for the president. From 1880 it was joined by other buildings – the President’s residence (1880, now Koenig Alumni Centre), Cottage No 1 (1885), Woodbury Hall (1890) and Hale

Science (1894). These early buildings lined public streets, orientated towards the community and valley. However, at the beginning of the twentieth century the outline of a quadrangle began to be traced behind them. With the construction of University Theatre (1903), Guggenheim Geography (1908), and the Macky Auditorium (1910–1922), the campus grew around a vast cruciform-shaped space that became Norlin Quadrangle and has remained at the heart of all subsequent campus plans. These eclectic buildings represent a