The Great White North: A review of UChicago’s newest dorm
This article was originally submitted to the Chicago Maroon. Full disclosure: the author applied to be a Viewpoints columnist for said Chicago Maroon in autumn of 2013 and was rejected. He did, however, intern at Architectural Record magazine this summer, so you can be pretty sure he knows what he’s talking about.
It’s no secret that architecture and money are related, and the University of Chicago is no exception. I lived in South Campus for two years, and even upon arriving at UChicago as a bushy-tailed Viewpoints columnist applicant in 2013, I couldn’t fail to notice the ways in which money had influenced my new home: its failure to obtain LEED certification, for example, or its faulty non-sealing windows, or its Gulag-like concrete stairwells, or the fact that it was nine stories instead of the proposed eighteen. All these things attested that the building had been designed during a financial upswing, but built during the recession; in other words, that South Campus had failed because capitalism had had a hiccup.
For a private university responsible for world-famous advances in the study of markets and greed, this simply would not fly, and therefore South had to be rendered obsolete and swept aside as soon as possible. Hence, a new dorm: Campus North Residential Commons, a building that finally expresses in architecture the thing that makes this university special. No, I’m not talking about free and open discourse, because I don’t know what that means. Rather, I’m talking about the triumph of capital.
The fact that I had to spend more than ten minutes searching for the cost of this building on the internet tells you it was probably way too high; at any rate, it cost at least as much as the foundational donation for the Odyssey Scholarship. (The UChicago News article about the dorm’s opening does not mention the cost of the building, but does mention that Dollop will serve pies from Hoosier Mama Pie Company.) The good news is that, unlike South Campus, which looks like an Econo Lodge, this building looks like it cost way too much money. From almost any angle, South Campus looks dingy, but when you’re approaching this new dorm from 56th Street, coming up through the no-man’s-land that used to be Greenwood Avenue, it’s hard not to be struck by the scale of the largest tower, which erases the sky entirely. The complex holds 800 students, but looks like it could easily fit 8,000.
Much has been said already about the absurd claim made by both UChicago press releases and Jeanne Gang herself that the tripartite mouth at the corner of 55th and University represents the UChicago campus “opening out onto the community,” but I’ll just add a few notes. A) There is a UCPD guard stationed at the street corner that “opens” onto the neighborhood. B) The buildings across the street from this corner are one story tall. C) The much-touted retail spaces in North are not inside the dorm complex but along 55th Street, on the ground floor of a ten-story concrete building—surely not the most inviting of all possible structures for, say, a Hyde Park resident who watched the university steamroll the neighborhood’s jazz clubs in the 1950s to make room for I.M. Pei’s University Park apartments, which are, incidentally, the only building in Hyde Park scarier than North. Half a century later, the university has one-upped itself: North has three toasterlike towers, to University Park’s measly two.
I don’t want to rip on Jeanne too much, because even if a lot of her buildings are flawed, she’s obviously a very smart woman, a great designer, and an industry pioneer. I have no problem with her designing mega-expensive apartments in Hyde Park (somebody has to do it), nor am I one of those people who thinks all new things in Hyde Park are bad and would throw a fit if I heard they were replacing Boston Market. For the record, I like Cemitas Puebla. Nevertheless, there was simply no way for Studio Gang, Blair Kamin, or any other outsider to see how perfectly Campus North distills everything loathsome and terrifying about this loathsome, terrifying institution. The resemblances border on the allegorical: the three-step increase of the tower heights represents the ever-expanding gluttony of capital, obviously, and the cascading curves of the concrete and glass perfectly resemble the rhetorical flourishes in an administrative email. The silhouetted students visible in the glass-walled house lounges at night represent the prisoners of an unjust system, while the cavernous lobby and vast landscaped walkways represent the essential emptiness of all profit-based motivations; meanwhile, the varyingly sized but universally rectangular glass of panels on the facades represent the farce of individuality in just such a profit-driven society. If I had to guess, I would say the circular courtyard, filled with skinny trees but restricted by caution tape, symbolizes UChicago’s stance on safe spaces.
The whole compound is nothing more and nothing less than a massive victory lap for the cretins who run this institution. This is who we are, the buildings seem to hum as you walk past, serving as proxies for the administrators one will never get to meet or meet with anyhow. This is the kind of thing we like to build. Get used to it. Plus, we’re number 3 on U.S. News now, so who the fuck are you to complain?
I know what you’re thinking: this aging rejected Viewpoints columnist lives off campus and hasn’t even been inside this damn building. Well, I actually have, and I can tell you it’s every bit as bad on the inside. The hallways are endless, undecorated, and spaceship-sterile—you expect an alien to jump around the corner at any second. The doors to bedrooms, bathrooms and study rooms alike are all about ten feet tall and sheer white, with keypad locks; they all look like doors into storage rooms for hazardous waste, and in many cases they are. The house lounges feature two-story staircases designed for giants where houses are supposed to gather for weekly meetings. Everything feels too tall, too wide, or too long, or maybe it was made that way on purpose to accommodate the massive new football players in the class of 2020. On the fifteenth-story observatory, you can see past the city’s neighborhoods and straight into the heart of the financial district. That’s where you belong, the vista whispers to first-year economics students. That’s where you’re headed. Your superday at Lazard is only a few years away.
I hate to say it, but those are the students this dorm is meant for, or at the very least, those are the students it’s going to create: drones in maroon pullovers hovering down fluorescent hallways to take classes, go to frats, or buy Insomnia cookies, then hovering back and powering down for the night. And look, I’m no fan of “quirkiness,” but I refuse to believe that we have to choose between hyper-caffeinated social awkwardness and the totalizing, infantilizing sterility of this new residence hall. Did we overshoot the landing on normalcy? Is that how we ended up with this 400,000-square-foot cryogenic storage facility, a building so immense and unfeeling that you half-expect there to be pressure-sealed airlocks at the end of each hallway and HAL 9000 units sitting in the lobby? We have to ask ourselves, is this what we really want? Just kidding, we had no say in the matter.
