Oral History of Modern Architecture Interviews With the Greatest Architects of the Twentieth... Book

Sorkin makes some reasonable complaints about the way the University has developed since Henry Ives Cobb's original master plan. These complaints are the following:

1. The coherence of the original quads has not been maintained in University building north of 57th street or south of the Midway.

2. Recent University building has focused on monumental structures: the B-school and the new gym are two examples. Monumentality does not produce of the kind of intimacy and multi-use space that the old quads do.

3. The Midway hasn't been productively used.

4. There is no southern face of the University, just the "Dresden-like" empty lots and fences of Woodlawn.

5. 55th street is a wasteland.

And so on.

I agree most with complaints 5 and 3. The attempt to revive some commercial life on 55th street with Lucky Strike seems like a total failure. There are unbelievable pictures of what 55th street was like before it's "renewal" in the 50s, full of pedestrians and storefronts. The Midway seems like a total waste of space, a glorified parking lot. Sorkin reproduces plans of the Midway during the Chicago World's Exposition, where it contains a "bedouin encampment", a "Vienna cafe", an "Ostrich farm", a "Captive Balloon", a "Moorish Palace", a "Japanese Bazaar", and a panorama of the "Bernese Alps", among other things. A captive balloon would certainly liven up today's Midway.

I like some of Sorkin's ideas in his new master plan a lot, especially the idea to turn student housing into collections of smaller and larger "houses" consisting of a variety of different kinds of buildings, and his proposal to scatter athletic facilities around (squash courts in one place, b-ball courts somewhere else) rather than concentrate them in one central, enormous facility. And I really like his proposal to revive the World's Expo midway as waterway, including punts and water-taxis that might take one from the Midway to the lake and on to the Gleacher Center!

Other proposals seem less convincing. He suggests that the B-school should have been built south of the Midway to give the southern side of campus some additional weight. Audacious, but the current b-school site is pretty successful. And his plan to split the Regenstein in half, bridging the sides with an airport-concouse-like "Omnipaideum" seems ill-advised.

But overall the criticisms are reasonable and they leave you wishing the development of the University was less piecemeal.