Shaping The Windy City

How two Illini architects have made their mark on Chicago

By Mary Timmins

Carol Ross Barney ’71 FAA, who has won an international reputation for innovative, site-specific designs, has a continuing belief in architecture as a social and practical art. During her studies at the University of Illinois, she said, “I learned that design wasn’t appearance or aesthetics – it was solving a problem.

“That approach has become more and more important as I have gone along.”

Ross Barney Architects, her Chicago design firm, has attracted such prestigious commissions as rebuilding the federal facility in Oklahoma City, a seven-year project undertaken after its destruction by bombing in 1995, and a new synagogue for the Jewish Reconstructionist Congregation in Evanston, which opened in February. The latter, which has achieved the highest level of the U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) rating system, has been acclaimed by The Chicago Tribune for the way “it fuses the structural, the sustainable and the spiritual into a powerful whole.” Other Ross Barney works include the Levy Senior Center (also in Evanston), the Little Village Academy for the Chicago public schools, the Family Development Center at Governors State University, the Swenson Science Building at the University of Minnesota-Duluth, the U.S. port of entry at Sault Ste. Marie, Mich., and an airy new public library in Champaign, which debuted in January.

Carol Ross Barney’s design for the Little Village Academy, a Chicago school, won two Honor Awards from the American Institute of Architecture. (Steve Hall/Hedrich Blessing photo )

The firm has won numerous awards, including the 2005 Thomas Jefferson Award for Public Architecture and four honor awards from the American Institute of Architects; 20 awards from AIA Chicago; and three prestigious Richard H. Driehaus Foundation Awards for Architectural Excellence in Community Design

Designs and improvements along the rail network that is the Chicago Transit Authority, including its famous Loop, are also on the Ross Barney résumé, including work on the stations at Douglas and Halsted, as well as the Fullerton and Belmont stops, where rehab is now going full tilt. Other CTA projects include such small but significant bridges as those at 35th Street and North Avenue and a viaduct and CTA pedestrian bridge at 47th Street, as well as a design for a Bloomingdale Line.

Ross Barney still awaits the opportunity to do a signature building in her architect-intensive hometown – a challenge about which she is cheerful enough. “Architecture used to be very regional because of material and the community of practice,” she said. “Now the trend is more global.

“Architects are young,” Barney concluded, “till they’re about 70.”

David Woodhouse ’71 FAA knew from the time he visited the Morton Arboretum, at the age of 8, that he wanted to build buildings. A half-century later, David Woodhouse Architects, named Chicago Firm of the Year for 2007 by the AIA, counts Morton Arboretum on its client list.

More broadly, David Woodhouse Architects has become a synonym for the renaissance along Chicago’s waterfront, from a master plan for rehabilitating the historic palace of glass that is the Lincoln Park Conservatory, to plans for a new building for DuSable harbor (just south of Navy Pier), to the visitor service kiosks around Grant Park’s Buckingham Fountain, to the bathhouse at Rainbow Beach in a predominantly African-American neighborhood on the South Side. The Windy City’s bid to host the 2016 Olympics at a string of venues linked by water as well as road includes a tennis venue proposed by Woodhouse for the lakefront in Lincoln Park. “The city has a tradition of being a host to the world,” said Woodhouse.

Woodhouse’s commitment to what he terms “the amazing vision” of Chicago’s park system, designed a century ago by Daniel Burnham, HON 1905, extends to a quest to connect the city by bike trails to the enormous forest preserve of Lake County and a fascination with abandoned industrial sites and train yards, where the architect envisions potential for such improbable new urban pastimes as stock-car racing.

Even deeper in the realm of big dreams is his paradigm for an Education District Quadrangle in the Loop area bounded by Michigan Avenue and Jackson, 11th and State streets, where 45,000 students attend 11 colleges and universities, including Roosevelt University and the Art Institute of Chicago. The visionary design, part of a larger project sponsored by the Chicago Central Area Committee, proposes to cloak the area with a hovering net of silvery metal that will cast fine shadows by day and by night will flash with every changing LEDs, forming, what Woodhouse’s Web site terms “a city-size video screen.”

“I’m old enough that a lot of my training was social rather than formal,” Woodhouse said of his studies at the U of I, echoing classmates Johnson and Ross Barney, of whom he said, “We’re all still friends – all part of the same Chicago architecture world and very mutually supportive.”

For further profiles of University of Illinois architects working in Chicago, see the March/April 2008 issue of Illinois Alumni magazine or read the "Shaping the Windy City" article online.