U. of Chicago Picks Tod Williams and Billie Tsien for Arts Center

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 & Associates and a business school by Raphael Viñoly Architects.

Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, who are married, share an architecture professorship at Yale University. Their firm is perhaps best known for designing the American Folk Art Museum in New York. Among the firm’s other works is the University of Pennsylvania’s Skirkanich Hall, opened in 2006.