Swing Space Doesn’t Have to Look Like an Afterthought

The U. of Cincinnati’s Care/Crawley Building provides swing space for renovations to the larger Medical Sciences Building behind it. (Chronicle photographs by Lawrence Biemiller)

Swing space is always a challenge on campuses: A building is overdue for renovation, but before the work can begin, the occupants have to be moved elsewhere. With overcrowding the rule at colleges across the country, where can those people go for a year or two?

Some institutions put up swing-space buildings, like the residence hall into which Yale University undergraduates have moved, college by college, while the university’s Collegiate Gothic residential quadrangles have undergone makeovers. Other institutions find swing space in campus basements (as did Pomona College) or off campus (the Johns Hopkins University bought a nearby apartment tower and used part of it for faculty offices during the recent renovation of Gilman Hall).

But it’s hard to think of swing space that can match the University of Cincinnati’s Care/Crawley Building, which opened two years ago and offered enough extra room that the university could begin renovating the 1973 Medical Sciences Building, a 900,000-square-foot, laboratory-laden behemoth to which the Care/Crawley Building gives a new front and a new personality.

The 240,000-square-foot Care/Crawley Building, which cost $135-million, was designed by Erik Sueberkrop of Studios Architecture, in collaboration with the firm Harley Ellis Devereaux. The nine-story atrium, designed to have a busy urban feel, is crossed by seven glass bridges, which link the Medical Sciences Building to six floors of lab and lab-support swing space.

The new building also houses a 45,000-square-foot library, a basement fitness center, and a dining facility. In the atrium, ground-level “study huts” are enclosed in glass, and part of the library forms a big glass bubble on one side. In places the original building’s wall and floors have been opened up to simplify circulation between the two structures.

Looking down into the atrium from one of the bridges, you can see a study balcony on top of the library.

From the same bridge you can look forward into the new lab space.

Cinderblock-lined corridors are hallmarks of the Medical Sciences Building. On several levels, parts of the older structure have been demolished for a new circulation space.

This new stair is at the boundary of the old and new structures.

A supersized-window was opened in another wall of the original building.

The new library juts out into the atrium from the side of the old building.

Glassed-in “study huts” enliven the atrium while providing quiet places to get some work done.