Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects will design a $100-million building for the creative and performing arts at the University of Chicago, the university has announced.

The new building, due to open in 2011, will occupy a prime site beside the Midway Plaisance, a large open space made famous as the pleasure grounds of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. The building will house a multi-function performance space, a black-box theater, a lecture hall that will double as a screening room, and exhibit space, as well as rehearsal rooms, studios, shops, editing labs, and classrooms. It will join other recent high-profile additions to the campus, including an athletics center by Cesar Pelli &...

Michigan State University has received $26-million from Eli and Edythe Broad for a new museum that will carry their name. It will house the university’s art collection, currently displayed at the Kresge Art Museum.

A site has been selected for the new museum, which will have one entrance facing the campus and another facing the community. The museum is expected to cost $30-million and have at least 26,000 square feet of exhibit space. Five architecture firms have been asked to submit proposals for the design: Zaha Hadid, of London; Coop Himmelblau, of Vienna and Los Angeles; Morphosis, of Santa Monica, Calif.; Kohn Pedersen Fox Architects, of New York; and Randall Stout Architects, of Los Angeles.

Mr. Broad, a financier turned philanthropist and art collector, is an alumnus of the university.

The American Society of Landscape Architects is honoring Terence G. Harkness, a professor of landscape architecture at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, with the society’s 2007 Jot D. Carpenter Teaching Medal. The award is given for “sustained and significant contributions to landscape architecture education.” Former students describe Mr. Harkness as “moving seamlessly from presenting a complex design issue to respectfully questioning a jury, to actively listening to one-on-one desk critique that bring out the best in a young designer,” says the society’s news release.

Emile E. Watson Administration Building, Florida Southern College (Chronicle photograph by Lawrence Biemiller)

Florida Southern College has the only college campus planned by Frank Lloyd Wright, easily the most famous and inventive architect in American history, and it has the largest single collection of Wright buildings anywhere — many of them built partly by students.

But for a liberal-arts college with a modest endowment, that’s a mixed blessing. Striking and historically important as they are, the Wright buildings present a long list of challenges: Some have structural problems that can be traced to Wright’s having relied on new and untested designs. Many are too small for the college’s current needs. And all have been hard to modernize affordably. A full report appears in The Chronicle.