Marie Antoinette advised the starving French masses to eat cake — and soon they were storming the Bastille.
At the University of Chicago, disputes play out with more civility than in 18th Century France. Almost never do the school’s discontented resort to the guillotine.
Instead, they hold a salon des refuses .
That is what architect Michael Sorkin, Class of ’69, calls the protest he is launching Monday, when he unveils his alternatives to the architecture and overall concepts of the university’s new, highly trumpeted $500 million master plan for physical improvements. The exhibition, organized by faculty and students unhappy with the school plan, will be on display in the university’s Reynolds Club for three weeks.
Sorkin, whose design studio is in New York, will be on hand Monday evening for his salon des refuses, primed and ready to discuss his opposition. “It’s kind of interesting,” he said. “In the 1960s when I was a student here, people protested by occupying buildings. Now, we do it by wanting to build them.”
The original Salon des Refuses, which means “exhibition of the rejected,” was held in Paris in 1863. Jurors of the official Salon, or Establishment art exhibition, has rejected 4,000 canvasses painted by the nascent Impressionist school and the resulting outcry caused Emperor Napoleon III to order that the spurned works be shown in a special exhibit called the Salon des Refuses. The term has since come to apply to dissenting exhibitions in a number of fields, notably architecture but also cinema, as in the Toronto Film Festival, which recently hosted one.
University officials said they were not displeased that Sorkin’s counterplan would be laid out for everyone to see right on the U. of C.’s own property. The event is being treated — wink! wink! — as an example of how free speech is exercised among intellectuals.
Nevertheless, there has to be a certain degree of nervous chagrin over developments.
In case university officials who engaged Sorkin a few years ago to brainstorm some “outside the box ideas” for the master plan, don’t get it, the outspoken architect is more than happy to explain: The master plan they ultimately did adopt — without his concepts but with input from prestigious architectural firms worldwide — “lacks poetry, to put it mildly,” he said.
Andrew Yang, an art history senior and former editor of the Free Press, an independent U. of C. newspaper, labeled Sorkin’s work a “reorganization of the university” as much as an architectural plan for buildings.
“He believes the student’s total experience at the university should be the most important aspect,” said Yang, a salon organizer. “For instance, he wants to consolidate the dormitories. Now they’re scattered around Hyde Park, and the effect is obvious. You have a very dispersed student body.”
One part of Sorkin’s thinking is to divide the campus into a series of smaller “colleges” or “villages,” similar to the layout of some Ivy League schools, where inter-connected dorms offer a greater variety of common living and academic experiences.
Sorkin’s concept would call for seven such villages to be placed around the campus, using existing buildings that would be remodeled where needed. This housing arrangement would surround core facilities such as the Chicago Theological Seminary, laboratory buildings on Hull Court, Ida Noyes, Maclean House and Pierce Hall.
Another highlight includes punching a hole in the side of the huge Regenstein Library, where the only entry is from the south, to provide an east-west flow of traffic. The library then would be connected with smaller, new buildings that would be built to provide a labyrinth of rooms going all the way to Bartlett Gymnasium to the east.
Other features: Leaving Stagg Field free from construction and maintaining it as a green space; a new Court Theatre facility at Ellis Avenue and 55th Street; artist housing near the Smart Museum of Art; and lots of underground parking.
The actual master plan, for which ground has already been broken, calls for building a huge sports facility, the Gerald Ratner Athletics Center, on an existing parking lot on South Ellis Avenue between 55th and 56th Streets; a 1,065-car parking garage across the street from the Ratner site; and dormitories at 58th Street and Woodlawn Avenue. A $137 million science center is under design and the existing Bartlett gym will be transformed into a dining hall. Finally, there will be a $20 million initiative to green the campus.
“The school takes a kind of management approach with its plan, but art is not done by committee,” Sorkin said. “There comes a point when someone has to take their list of desires and add vision. For the university, the numbers seem to be the vision.”
Now, of course, there is the possibility that Sorkin could become a rallying forcefor those opposing the university’s intentions, but construction is already underway on some parts of the master plan, such as the parking garage.
“That his ideas given to us early in the planning would turn into an alternative plan was not what we were envisioning,” said University Provost — and planning committee chair — Geoffrey Stone.
“Is it too late for Michael? Yes and no. Decisions have been made about particular projects that have gone beyond the point where they could be sensibly re-thought, and shouldn’t be anyway. On the other hand, to the extent Michael thinks about issues beyond those we’ve already addressed, there’s no reason why 10 or 15 years from now we couldn’t go back and use them.”
Stone also noted the master plan was completely vetted by the committee “through endless meetings” and that it is his sense that the official designs have great popular support in the school community. The master plan was adopted under former university President Hugo Sonnenschein, whose other proposals for increasing enrollment and tinkering with the core curriculum were hotly criticized by some alumni, faculty and students before he left office.
New President Don Michael Randel was hired after everything was approved. Though an architecture enthusiast, Randel, most believe, should be recused from master plan debates. He is on record as saying he “prefers architecture that people debate as opposed to architecture that no one notices.”
Sorkin’s effort is not the only opposition that has been mounted. A lawsuit by Chicago lawyer Robert Stone (no relation to Geoffrey Stone) seeking to stop the plan on preservationist grounds has been filed but already has been dismissed in Cook County Circuit Court.
Sorkin, though undaunted, confessed that his labors might rightly be seen as “quixotic.” Much of the thinking he has put into his counterplan draws on his days spent as a student at the South Side institution in the 1960s, a time, of course, characterized by great campus protest and upheaval.
