Envisioning the next UIC

Master plan covers Near West campus from 10,000 feet and decades down the road

09/16/2009 10:00 PM

By MICAH MAIDENBERG
Editor

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The Behavioral Sciences Building, 1007 W. Harrison, and University Hall, 601 S. Morgan, could be on the chopping block as UIC plans for the future of its campus.
MICAH MAIDENBERG/Staff



The University of Illinois-Chicago last updated its master plan in 1998 to prepare for development of what is now called the South Campus, a stretch of S. Halsted between Roosevelt and the 16th Street train viaduct.

Building South Campus sparked a raucous debate about the school’s vision for the land and protests about removal of what many saw as a unique urban meeting ground. The area was known by generations of Chicagoans as home of the freewheeling Maxwell Street Market and as the breeding ground for Chicago’s electric blues sound.

Today, South Campus is largely complete, home to a busy mixture of university students and townhome owners, new retail and UIC institutions, such the school’s convention center.

A new round of updating the campus master plan is now under way. While South Campus marked a major expansion across of Roosevelt, the traditional campus border, this time UIC is contemplating living within existing boundaries — for the most part.

In general, UIC envisions a greener campus, with a spate of new buildings replacing the current seas of surface parking and better connections between the school’s health and medical uses on the west and the traditional academic campus on the east.

“Campuses need a road map for understanding where they want to be in the future,” said David Mann, a planner consulting on the project for the school, at a meeting about the process last week.

Mann and representatives from UIC facilities and design departments have floated three different scenarios for both the East and West Campus. Planning started late last year; Phase I of the process is complete. After a preferred scenario is selected, a final report will be delivered by the end of May.

While Mann acknowledged that the current stage of the process examined the school from the “10,000-foot level, looking at this campus from a 25- to 35-year horizon into future,” a number of specific ideas and open questions about the campus and future developments did get broached.

On West Campus, for example, an area bound by Polk, Roosevelt, Ashland and Damen, the UIC Medical Center is expected to grow.

One scenario for the west side has the institution jumping across Roosevelt, expanding into land controlled owned by the Illinois Medical District. Another proposes a “vertical hospital” — a taller structure within current West Campus boundaries, with less new construction south of Roosevelt.

Marshfield will be closed in all three scenarios and landscaping would be added as connective spaces designed to improve the area’s visuals. A new teaching center, at least 1 million square feet, could be spread over several buildings or consolidated. Other structures would be demolished. Parking garages would be built. Taylor Street would be the primary connection east.



Perhaps the most substantial open question posed for East Campus — an area bound by the Eisenhower Expressway, the Dan Ryan Expressway, Roosevelt, and, on the west, Racine and Morgan — is the fate of two of campus designer Walter Netsch’s signature buildings.

Both University Hall, a towering rectangular skyscraper designed in the Brutalist style at 601 S. Morgan, and the Behavioral Sciences Building, 1007 W. Harrison, a squat building with oblique geometries, could be demolished down the road.

David Taeyaerts, director of UIC’s Office of Campus Learning Environments, said a separate study could resolve the future of University Hall and the Behavioral Sciences Building.

Whether the buildings are architectural icons or white elephants isn’t easy to determine, said Bob O’Neill, executive director of the Grant Park Conservancy and advisory council.

“It’s very interesting concept getting rid of those buildings … I think the jury’s going to be out on that one,” O’Neill said at the meeting last week.

Architects, he noted, sometimes see their status rise after their deaths (Netsch died in June 2008): “What if [Netsch] really hits it big in terms of his reputation 50 years from now, can you believe we destroyed two of his most iconic buildings? I don’t know.”



Bob O’Neill and brother Dennis — himself recently hired as executive director of the University Village Association — were the most vocal participants at the public meeting about the master plan last week. They peppered UIC staff and consultants from opposite sides of an auditorium in the school’s biological sciences building.

Both grew up near the university and share the belief that the school is ready to emerge from “the shadow of Urbana-Champaign,” home of the University of Illinois flagship, as Bob put it, and end UIC’s “second class status” to the downstate campus, as Dennis said.

Realizing the vision of the master plan depends, of course, on finding money for new construction and, thus, politics in Springfield.

But while the school imagines its future, Dennis O’Neill said it at least deserved credit for the planning process. That wasn’t the case during previous efforts, he said, including the South Campus expansion.

“Again, I love the project, I think the plan was good,” Dennis O’Neill said in a follow-up interview about South Campus. “But we had to really push to have a say as community members in what happened down there.”

The South Campus experience — and the displacement it meant — was on the minds of others in the crowd last week as well.

The principal of Walsh Elementary, 2015 S. Peoria, wondered what UIC’s future hope-for growth would mean for his school.

“When you start making these improvements, contractors are going to start coming in and buying up buildings and start displacing some of the students we’re serving right now,” he said.


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