Back to School

The University of Illinois has almost as many architectural styles as it has buildings. I've been able to get pictures of some and I have a list of others to photograph, so this is just the first of multiple posts. We should start a quick and dirty history of the University. It will explain pretty much everything.

History of the University 
In 1862, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Morrill Land-Grant Colleges Act of 1862, providing for the establishment of publicly-funded universities in the US. Texans founded Texas A&M under the Morrill Act. After the war, the state of Illinois passed the Griggs Bill of 1867 allocating land in Champaign-Urbana for the creation of a university. Like all land-grant colleges, the university in Champaign-Urbana was intended to be an Agricultural and Mechanical college, however, for reasons lost to history, the planners didn't want to bother with the the initials A&M. So they named the new school Illinois Industrial University. By the mid-1880s, the university had added liberal arts to the curriculum and the administration felt that current name sounded like a reformatory, a school for delinquents, so they switched to University of Illinois.

University Buildings
Classes commenced in an old seminary building, nicknamed The Elephant because of its size and ugliness. I found no official word on the style of The Elephant, but it looks Italianate to me. It had dorms, kitchens, and classrooms and could accommodate 130 students. In the 1880s, The Elephant fell over in a rain storm and the university built the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology in its place, about half a mile due north of the main quad.

The Elephant:

http://www.fs.uiuc.edu/

By the 1870s, the student population started to burst at the seams, so the university hired John M. Van Osdel to design University Hall in the Second Empire Style. A few years later, architect Nathan Clifford Ricker built the Chemistry Laboratory next to it, also in Second Empire.

Ricker graduated from the Illiois Industrial University in 1873, the first person in the US to earn an architecture degree. He designed the Chemistry Laboratory and five other buildings on campus.

University Hall:

http://physics.illinois.edu/

Bringing Order to the Chaos
For the most part, the University has a mish-mash of architectural styles. They built buildings in the next available spot in the trendiest new style of the time. That said, the University grew from north to south and if you walk along that line of growth, you can almost see the development of architectural fad over time. Second Empire dominates the north part of campus, Queen Anne and Romanesque Revival line the center, and Georgian Revival adorns the southern end. Also, along the central axis lie the four quads.

This helter skelter planning drove administrators crazy. In the 1920s, they hired Charles A. Platt to sort it out. A prominent New York architect, Platt had designed homes and bulidings for the Astors, the Roosevelts, the Smithsonian, and MIT. At the southern end of the north-south axis, Platt planned an additional east-west axis (along Gregory Road, I believe). If you look at a map of the university today, you can see it still forms a rough triangle connecting those two axes. Platt designed buildings in the Georgian Revival style along the southern axis and dotted through the remainder of campus to unify the campus with a common architectural theme.

That gives you a rough overview of how the campus developed. In the next post, we'll look at some of the buildings.