To make way for the University of Chicago Campus North Residential Commons, the school demolished Harry Weese’s 1960 Pierce Tower, who’s stacked bays and neo-mansard crown showcased some of the University of Chicago’s least confident mid-century architecture on the famously Collegiate Gothic campus. Something of an inscrutable fortress, it thought little enough of its Hyde Park neighborhood to put its loading dock and dumpsters at the corner of University Avenue and 55th Street, the main boulevard.
But the new residence halls, by Studio Gang, reach out and pull Hyde Park in, placing the campus’ northern gateway at the same corner, with the entrance to a cloistered courtyard over which the three residential towers hover. “Now that’s our portal into the campus,” said studio Gang founder Jeanne Gang at the building’s opening yesterday.
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