Gordon Parks Arts Hall is a 21st Century makerspace for the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools. Every space is designed to create and present content. The structure reinterprets the adjacent neo-gothic architecture, creating a visual dialogue with the past while looking squarely to the future.

The building is bracketed by the two symmetrical neo-gothic towers of Belfield Hall at the north end of the University of Chicago Laboratory School’s main campus. The 1904 limestone façade of Belfield is reflected and re-interpreted in a muscular form of the Arts Hal. It is symbolic of the evolution of Lab Schools’ values and commitment to “present art as a language with unique expressive powers,” integral to the school’s ambitious educational mission.

Central to Lab Schools’ pedagogy is John Dewey’s educational philosophy of hands on, project-based learning. Gordon Parks Arts Hall provides an up-to-date facility to this approach, and Lab's emphasis on multi-media literacy; the idea that in a multi-media literate world, it is imperative to learn how to communicate in every possible medium — video, music, photography, painting, animation, and writing.

“The new building should be understood as a place where work is created by hand, and then shown to a larger, real or virtual audience using every possible media imaginable," says Joe Valerio, FAIA, Design Principal.

The building has an inventory of spaces including art and music labs on the upper floors and on the ground floor there is a formal art gallery, two large rehearsal rooms and the Studio Theater - also used for cinema screening. Adjacent are two large performance spaces; the 750-seat assembly and music hall, and the Sherry Lansing 250-seat black-box theater, which also can be used as a sound stage.

The enclosure combines Indiana limestone, dark ribbed metal panels and glass. The limestone connects the building to its context. The dark metal panels enclose the two large performance spaces – both inside and outside. And the glass becomes taut gossamer infill, letting south light into the main gathering space, and cool north light into all the labs and large rehearsal rooms. Large vertical solar chimneys anchor the north façade, naturally ventilating the first floor rooms. A folded glass plane is stretched between the east and west stone facades. Its shape responds directly to the amount of programmed space, which was reduced from the 1st to 2nd, and then again from the 2nd to 3rd floors.

There is a tradition of inserting circular forms on an orthogonal mass, as seen in the Pantheon, Palladio’s Villa Rotunda or the nearby Museum of Science and Industry. At Gordon Parks Arts Hall, the auditorium needed to address the Sherry Lansing Theater to the east, the interior garden to the south and the main entrance to the northwest. The insertion of the circle solved this complexity. Its asymmetry to the orthogonal mass and the way it expresses the interior function on the exterior was emphatically modern. The cylindrical space anchors not only the architecture, but also the school, acting as a town hall where the entire Lab community can gather.

Gordon Parks Arts Hall is a symbol of many things. The continuity of John Dewey’s pedagogy of hands-on learning connects the past, present and future over a 120-year history. Where innovation and change is expected and a new commitment is made to multi-media literacy, using every possible medium to communicate — including architecture.

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QuietJoint -- Acoustic Partition Closure

QuietJoint -- Acoustic Partition Closure

by EMSEAL Joint Systems, Ltd.

QuietJoint -- Acoustic Partition Closure