i. institutional support and commitment to continuous improvement

I. Institutional Support and Commitment to Continuous Improvement
I. INSTITUTIONAL SUPPORT AND COMMITMENT TO
CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT
I.2. RESOURCES
I.2.3 Physical Resources
Chicago itself is a vital part of the School, and with significant buildings by Daniel Burnham, Louis
Sullivan, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Frank Lloyd Wright, Helmut Jahn, Frank Gehry, and Renzo Piano,
among others, Chicago is an ideal seat of architectural education. In addition to the significant archi-
tecture, other universities—including Loyola, Northwestern, DePaul, the University of Chicago, and the
University of Illinois at Chicago among others—their resources, and the culturally diverse neighbor-
hoods and citizenry of the city make Chicago an open-air museum for students. The School-museum
complex—located in Grant Park, adjacent to Millennium Park, and overlooking Michigan Avenue—has
been the central inspiring presence that houses the museum’s collection, auditoria, restaurants, admin-
istrative offices, libraries, and a portion of the School. Several nearby building house the School’s class-
rooms, students services and housing, administrative offices, more libraries and special collections, and
exhibitions spaces.
Of particular note is the building which houses the MArch program: the Sullivan Center. Along with
several administrative office, the School relocated AIADO and all its facilities—including its classrooms,
instructional facilities, shops, faculty and administrative offices—to the twelfth floor of the Sullivan Cen-
ter in the landmark Sullivan building originally designed as the Carson Pirie Scott Building, at 36 South
Wabash Avenue, in 2006. The move was made to accommodate the expansion of the department as
it established new graduate programs in design. This building also houses the Fashion Design depart-
ment (BFA, Post-Baccalaureate, and MDes) and the Sullivan Galleries run by Exhibition and Events.
The facilities for AIADO include: dedicated, technologically “smart” studio, lecture and seminar spaces;
a full range of traditional and cutting-edge object-making and digital output facilities; an eighty-foot
display area and endowed project space for exhibitions; faculty offices; and a nearly universal wireless
access and among its signature features. Below, AIADO’s instructional, exhibition, and administrative
spaces are discussed at length.
A) Instructional physical resources
Teaching studios on the twelfth floor of the Sullivan building are configured in two groups of 5 or 6
each, one for undergraduates, which has “hot” desks that are reassigned for different classes, and one
for graduates, which has assigned desks. Each group of studios is made of a range of open twenty-one
foot square columnar bays that run along the famous Louis Sullivan strip window on State Street. This
long open space allows an important and useful wide-angle view of 120 years of buildings in Chicago’s
Loop, and encourages faculty and students to observe what other studios are doing in an informal,
community-building way.
The next bay toward the inside of the building is divided, however, into two columnar bay pin-up and
lecture-discussion-critique areas. A movable sound-attenuating curtain divides each of these two bay
pin-up areas. Normally a full class discussion can take place in a circle of rolling chairs in this discus-
sion area, and still be quiet enough for several of these to occur simultaneously in the larger group of
studios. When a double class is held, and a number of integrated technical practice classes are double
the normal enrollment by design, the curtain is pulled back to allow a larger discussion space.
Each graduate student in the professional programs is assigned an individual desk area immediately
adjacent to a teaching area that includes a pin up and discussion space, and ceiling mounted data
projectors with VHS and DVD players. All desks are equipped with hardware Ethernet connecting to
shared 2D and 3D printing facility, and wireless is available throughout the floor for general Internet ac-
91 | Spring 2011
SECTION I Institutional Support and Commitment to Continuous Improvement