Roosevelt U. Will Construct 32-Story Building With Classrooms and Housing

Roosevelt University is planning a glass-sheathed 32-story building that will have classrooms, labs, faculty and administrative offices, housing for 600 students, and a recreation center. The building is necessary, the Chicago institution says, because it expects a 50-percent increase in enrollment from 2007 to 2017.

The building, designed by VOA, will replace an existing dormitory on a 100-foot-by-170-foot lot on Wabash Avenue. It will adjoin the university’s main building, an 1896 landmark by Louis Sullivan and Dankmar Adler that was constructed to house the Auditorium Theater, a hotel, and an office building (left: The new glass tower rises beside the stone-clad Auditorium Building; Roosevelt U. images). According to the Chicago Sun-Times, Roosevelt closed the existing dorm, the Herman Crown Center, after concluding that equipping it with a sprinkler system would cost more than the structure is worth.

The new building, which is expected to cost $110-million, is to open in 2012. As befits an institution in the city that perfected the skyscraper more than a century ago, the university says the new building will be the second-tallest campus building in the country, after the University of Pittsburgh’s 42-story Cathedral of Learning. At 469 feet, it will be the sixth-tallest academic building in the world, the tallest being Moscow State University, at 787 feet.

The university said the new building would amount to a “vertical campus” and released a description that hints at how complex it must have been to design:

Basement
Space for physical resources
Space for textbook storage
Mechanical systems

First Floor
Two-story main lobby
Admissions office
Security desk
Bookstore entrance at the Fine Arts Annex
Seven elevators

Mezzanine
Financial aid
Student accounts
Advising
Portion of the registrar’s office
Academic Success Center

Second Floor
Dining center with 313 seats; open to students and faculty and staff members
Bridge connecting the dining center with the Fainman Lounge in the Auditorium Building (the bridge and another connection to Auditorium Building will make this floor a campus crossroads)
Catering services

Third Floor
Large multipurpose room for lectures, movies, concerts
Career-services offices
Offices for student activities and student organizations
TV lounge

Fourth Floor
Conference area for 100 people with large, medium, and small conference rooms
Catering services
Rehearsal space for the Auditorium Theatre

Fifth Floor
Recreation center open to students and faculty and staff members with weights and cardiovascular equipment
Two multipurpose rooms for exercise, yoga, and martial arts
Locker rooms

Sixth Floor
Large classrooms holding 96 and 108 students
Two smaller classrooms
Conference room

Seventh Floor
Chemistry floor with two teaching labs and one research lab
Faculty offices

Eighth Floor
Biology floor, with three teaching labs, student-research lab, and conference room
Departmental offices

Ninth Floor
Biology-research lab
Faculty offices
Physics teaching lab
78-student classroom
Conference room

10th Floor
Four general classrooms
Learning laboratory
Small rooms for breakout meetings

11th Floor
24 private offices for the College of Business Administration
One tiered and one regular classroom

12th Floor
Offices for the business dean and assistant deans
Learning-lab trading floor
Classrooms
Marshall Bennett Institute of Real Estate

13th Floor
Offices for the president, provost, and CFO and their staffs
Two conference rooms

14th Floor
Transfer floor to student housing
Security sesk
Resident-life offices
Program room for meetings
Three elevators that go up to residential floors; four elevators that go down, serving the rest of the building

15th Floor
Laundry room
TV Room

16th to 31st Floors
Hhousing for more than 600 students (double and single suites)
Rooms for residence assistants
Student lounges facing east, toward Lake Michigan