The Reva and David Logan Center for Creative and Performing Arts
Architects Tod Williams and Billie Tsien Unveil Designs for the Logan Arts Center
The architects presented their Center designs Tues, Nov 10, 2009 to a standing-room only campus audience of students, faculty, alumni, staff, and friends.
Video: Design Unveiling Highlights
Video produced by the Chicago Media Initiatives Group
Slideshow: Logan Arts Center Design
The Reva and David Logan Center for Creative and Performing Arts
The Reva and David Logan Center for Creative and Performing Arts uses innovative design to foster artistic experimentation and multidisciplinary inquiry. A cornerstone of the South Campus located along the Midway Plaisance, the visually stunning, glass-and-stone building, designed by Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, will seamlessly bridge the space between art and architecture. (download PDF)
Northeast View
The 11-story, 155-foot tower is designed around the tradition of integrated practice and criticism—one of the defining elements of UChicago arts. A café at the base links collaborative spaces including classrooms, galleries, media labs, studios performance spaces, and set building shops. The tower features a seminar room with expansive open windows that penetrate the corner of the eighth floor, a rooftop deck, and a double-height performance penthouse. To the west, a sawtooth roof allows natural light from the north to permeate the visual arts studios and shops. (download PDF)
Southwest View
The evening view of the southern entrance of the Logan Arts Center (viewed looking northeast). The Adele and Willard Gidwitz Lobby is framed by a light-filled cantilever lounge space and a box office that will provide information on arts activities throughout the University of Chicago. (download PDF)
North Lobby and Gallery Entrance
The north lobby off the Midway Plaisance will welcome guests to experience the gallery and video projection space for work by faculty, students, and visiting visual artists. It also will provide a dramatic entrance to the café, the tower film screening room, and the lower-level digital media center. Artwork shown in the Gallery created by Laura Letinsky and Jason Salavan, Faculty in the Department of Visual Arts. (download PDF)
The Adele and Willard Gidwitz Lobby
Located off the southern entrance, the Adele and Willard Gidwitz Lobby welcomes audience members to three state-of-the-art performance spaces (450 seat auditorium, black box theater, and proscenium theater), and provides a daytime gathering space with access to the second floor rooftop deck and courtyard. (download PDF)
Central Courtyard
Light reflects off the glass-flanked open air courtyard (looking west from Midway Studios) and creates an inviting gathering space. The streamlined, linear design is highlighted by a bridge along the podium roof connecting the film screening room and second floor rooftop deck. The Gidwitz Lobby, north lobby, café and shops are also visible and physically accessible. The courtyard is also designed to feature an outdoor performance venue for both spontaneous and formal artistic presentation. (download PDF)
Theater / Visual Arts Shops
At the central core of the building, the shared Theater / Visual Arts Shops are lofted to the second story and flooded with natural light via the sawtooth skylights. The shared workspaces are designed to encourage student collaboration in construction and painting of sets, sculptures, and props. (download PDF)
Performance Penthouse
Topping off the tower, the Performance Penthouse will provide dramatic views of the city as a backdrop for music classes, lectures and colloquia, ensemble rehearsals and weekend performances, including poetry readings, jazz concerts, and student improvisational cabarets. (download PDF)
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“ Creativity has always been a hallmark of the University and an essential stimulus of the world-changing ideas that have taken root here. The opening of the Reva and David Logan Center for Creative and Performing Arts will give the University an unprecedented opportunity to pioneer new ideas and art forms by bringing diverse artistic disciplines and perspectives together in dynamic collaboration under one roof, and establishing a site where intellectual inquiry and creative practice meet. We look forward eagerly to welcoming our neighbors on the South Side to share this exciting space with us, and to expanding the ranks of first-rate cultural institutions in Chicago.”
—President Robert J. Zimmer
A Nexus of Inquiry and Practice
In this state-of-the-art home our faculty and students will engage in the common enterprise of experiment, inquiry, performance and production. Here disciplinary boundaries will be crossed, theories challenged, ideas questioned. Slated to open in Spring 2012, the Center will be a hub for the robust arts scene on campus, which spans classroom and studio, more than 75 student-run arts groups, as well as our acclaimed museums, theaters, and music presenters.
A Portal to Creativity
The center will add significant space and resources to Chicago’s visual arts, theater and performance, music, and cinema and media studies programs—and inspire everything in between. The architects conceive the building as a “mixing bowl,” fusing spaces, weaving individual rehearsal rooms with artist studios, critical theory classrooms with shops, and media editing labs with a video production studio. Public spaces include ensemble rehearsal rooms, black-box and fixed-seat theaters, a performance auditorium with exceptional acoustics, a gallery, a state-of-the-art film screening venue, a café, and dynamic outdoor spaces.
A Gateway for Collaborative Community and City Programs
Situated along Midway Plaisance at 60th Street and Ingleside, the Logan Arts Center will open the creative and critical activity of the University to the neighborhood and the city as never before. This southern gateway between campus and community will be the entrance to a range of new collaborations, a crossroads where the public engages with distinguished local and international artists and scholars as they create, debate, exhibit, and perform.
To learn more about our vibrant arts programs, explore arts.uchicago.edu.
