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College Employees Value Campus Environment, 'Chronicle' Survey Finds
When a Chronicle survey asked college employees what they value about their jobs, they put the physical environment in which they work at the top of the list. (Chronicle photograph of Washington & Lee U.)
Rise in Tornadoes, Floods Poses Risk to Colleges
What if the sort of extreme weather that has left the University of Iowa inundated in floodwaters is not a freak event? What if it is a sign of things to come? (Photograph by AP Images)
Art & Architecture Renovations Near Completion at Yale U.
Paul Rudolph's 1963 Brutalist icon is getting a makeover, plus an addition by Charles Gwathmey.
Guest Blogger: Marc Mayerson
Like swashbuckling movie heroes, facilities planners take on herculean tasks.
Other News
U. of Baltimore Competition Draws Designers
In New Headache for SMU's Bush Library, Lobbyist Hints at Cash-for-Meetings Deal
News Analysis: Colleges Should Plan—and Teach—for an Oil-Scarce World
New campus buildings
Multimedia
A Green Building as a Billboard for Science
(A 2006 Chronicle video)
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About Buildings & Grounds
Buildings & Grounds is written by Scott Carlson (left) and Lawrence Biemiller (right). Scott Carlson writes about architecture, facilties, energy, and sustainability, among other topics. Lawrence Biemiller writes about architecture and facilities and contributes to Notes from Academe. What's happening on your campus? Let us know.
A Library Addition at U. of Chicago Keeps Books Close
A glass dome will serve as the visible portion of a library addition at the U. of Chicago, designed by Helmut Jahn. The bulk of the building will be underground. (U. of Chicago images)
The University of Chicago is planning a $80-million library addition, designed by Chicago architect Helmut Jahn. The library will take the form of a glass dome and will sit close to the university’s Brutalist Joseph Regenstein Library. The library, which will open in 2010, will be named in honor of Joe Mansueto, chairman and chief executive officer of Morningstar Inc., and his wife, Rika, who gave $25-million to the project.
The dome will rise 35 feet above the surface, and according to The Chicago Tribune, it will have a coating that will help reduce heat gain in the summer and heat loss in the winter. (It will also be coated with dots to reduce the number of birds that might smack into it.)
Most of the building will be hidden underground. Book vaults, stacks, special collections, and preservation facilities will exist in the bulk of the building 50 feet underground. The high-density system will have the capacity to store 3.5 million books and will allow patrons to get access to books instantly with the help of a robotic retrieval system. The university acquires about 150,000 books a year, so the space is expected to provide about 22 years of growth.
Even though space on the urban campus is tight, faculty members were adamant that books should remain close by and accessible — they would not stand for moving books to an off-campus storage facility, as many research universities have. “The experience of most of these other libraries is that the off-site stuff doesn’t get used,” Andrew Abbott, a sociology professor who served on a library-planning board, told The Chronicle in 2005. “People go to work where books are easily available.”
Mr. Jahn’s design joins other glassy structures by signature architects that have been built on the campus recently, including a business school by Raphael Viñoly and an athletics center by Cesar Pelli. His library design for Chicago is also well within the tradition of underground libraries at space-crunched research universities, such as Cornell University, the University of Michigan, and the University of Minnesota. —Scott Carlson
Comments
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Gee, I didn’t know the late Joseph Regenstein’s first name was Brutalist, and I live here in Chicago.
Learn something new every day.
— jon May 12, 12:56 PM #
Your comment that “[m]ost of the building will be hidden underground” suggests a solution to the problem created by this ugly and ill-fitting building at one of my almas that matter.
— S. Britchky May 12, 01:08 PM #
This is certainly an improved use of the space since the days when I suffered through required gym on the old Stagg Field in my first year. And though I have always liked the Gothic part of campus the best, I think the dome is quite attractive!
— Lawrence S. Lerner May 12, 03:48 PM #
Isn’t this addition going to be RIGHT NEXT to the underground squash court that ol’ Enrico had his glowing success in? Seems like it’ll take more than a few black dots on the glass dome to keep that heat out!
— Victor May 12, 06:31 PM #
I was a partime library assistant at the 5th floor of the Reg when I was a grad student. This adds a fascinating feature to the overall architecture of the Reg.
— muhammad zainiy uthman May 12, 07:34 PM #