How do you combine an accreditation-required Integrated Design Studio with curricular requirements for a high-rise project and a general interest among students in adaptive reuse? You Frankenstein a program together with some help from ace professionals with connections and their own ideas for recycling historic buildings into economically viable, culturally and socially relevant additions to downtown.

William LeBaron Jenney’s Second Leiter (also Siegel-Cooper) Store is a massive, half-block structure that served as a department store for the first chapters of its life, and was then carved up into academic facilities for Robert Morris University in 1998. When RMU merged with Roosevelt University several years ago, the building was mothballed, leaving something like 440,000 square feet of space in a prime Loop location vacant.

What to do with that much space? Unlikely in this development climate that it could work as commercial office space, so working with Ken DeMuth of Pappageorge Haymes and Kim Clawson of WJE, we developed a program for academic and dormitory space for the Loop’s “Seven Colleges,” small liberal-arts or professional schools that looked at developing a shared “University Center” about ten years ago (some survivors may remember that this accidentally turned into a “Chicago’s Tallest Building” studio for a graduate class at Iowa State…). We added the adjacent corner site, at Wabash and Van Buren, and proposed about 1.3 million square feet of residential and academic facilities, which could be distributed between the existing structure and a new, corner tower.

The catch, of course, is that the Leiter Building’s floor plates are massive–and too deep to easily adapt to apartment or dormitory functions. But its column grid–varying, but around 22′ square–doesn’t leave much room for the large classrooms that the program required. So students had to think not only about replanning the building’s floor plates; they also had to make value judgments about how much to alter the existing structure to make the program work, and/or whether to do the hard structural work of building a high-rise tower atop a bunch of long-span classrooms.

After a stellar field trip in January, where we got to tour the existing building and see newly-archived original drawings from Jenney’s office, students got to work on the Jenga-like massing studies required to fit rectangular pegs into (differently-sized) rectangular holes, all the while thinking about what it meant to build within and adjacent to a classic Chicago School building. We did exercises tracing the building’s elevations (Ken, Kim, and I have a working theory about its odd proportions and how tall it was really supposed to be…) and looking at materials and composition strategies from other 1890s buildings in the Loop. And, since it was an Integrated Design Studio, teams spent the time to figure out exiting strategies, mechanical system layouts, and cladding details.

This cohort of graduates will likely spend half their professoinal careers working on existing buildings–if not more. Giving them the experience of the constraints and inspirations that the process brings with it has become an important part of our studio teaching at Illinois, and this program and site nicely balanced their understandable desire to design something “new” with the guiderails of a rigorous column grid and a building fabric that they had to treat as a ‘ready-made.’

Teams came up with genuinely innovative ideas, either carving light courts and multi-bay voids into the existing building’s grid or, in one case, slicing the outer bays out of the building to leave the facade standing as a screen shading a covered collonnade/balcony space for retail and residential units behind. As the tower schemes developed, we also talked about the importance of a presence on Chicago’s skyline, and how sculpting architectural solutions into civically relevant forms was another dimension of the city’s skyscraper heritage.

Most of these folks are freshly graduated and in the first weeks of their careers…a great bunch to work with, and I’m looking forward to seeing how they take this experience into practice. Thanks to everyone who supported the studio, including Nathaniel Parks, the Tigerman McCurry Director of the Art Institute of Chicago Archives Research Center, who alerted us to the drawing tranche there and generously provided access, and to Rachel Will of WJE who rode shotgun as we mulled over how to develop the program. Finally, huge thanks to Tom Liravongsa, Instagram and YouTube’s “Skyscraper Guy,” for providing access to the Leiter Building.