University of Chicago - 1955

Copyright 2005 David R. Phillps

The University of Chicago (commonly referred to as UChicago, the U of C, or just Chicago) is a private, coeducational research university in Chicago, Illinois, USA. It was founded by oil magnate and benefactor John D. Rockefeller and incorporated in 1890; William Rainey Harper became its first president in 1891 and the first classes were held in 1892.

The University consists of the College of the University of Chicago, various graduate programs and interdisciplinary committees organized into four divisions, six professional schools, and a school of continuing education. The University enrolls approximately 5,000 students in the College and about 14,000 students overall. It has a reputation of devotion to academic scholarship and intellectualism, and is affiliated with 46 Rhodes Scholars and 85 Nobel Prize laureates as of the 2009 awards announcement.

In 2007, the University spent $322,488,000 on scientific research. University of Chicago scholars have played a role in the development of the Chicago School of Economics, the Chicago School of Sociology, the Law and Economics movement in legal analysis, and the physics leading to the world's first man-made, self-sustaining nuclear reaction. The University is also home to the Committee on Social Thought, an interdisciplinary graduate research program, and to the largest university press in the United States.

The older buildings of the University of Chicago employ Gothic-style architecture like that of the University of Oxford.

The main campus of the University of Chicago consists of 211 acres in the Chicago neighborhoods of Hyde Park and Woodlawn, seven miles south of downtown Chicago. The northern and southern portions of campus are separated by the Midway Plaisance, a large, linear park created for the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition.

The first buildings of the University of Chicago campus, which make up what is now known as the Main Quadrangles, were part of a "master plan" conceived by two University of Chicago trustees and plotted by Chicago architect Henry Ives Cobb. The Main Quadrangles consist of six quadrangles, each surrounded by buildings, bordering one larger quadrangle. The buildings of the Main Quadrangles were designed by Cobb, Shepley, Rutan and Coolidge, Holabird & Roche, and other architectural firms in the English neo-Gothic style, deliberately patterned after the layouts of the Universities of Oxford. (Mitchell Tower, for example, is modeled after Oxford's Magdalen Tower, and the University Commons, Hutchinson Hall, is a duplicate of Oxford's Christ Church Hall.)

After the 1940s, the Gothic style on campus began to give way to modern styles. In 1955, Eero Saarinen was contracted to develop a second master plan, which led to the construction of buildings both north and south of the Midway, including the Laird Bell Law Quadrangle; a series of arts buildings; a building designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe for the University's School of Social Service Administration; and the Regenstein Library, the largest building on campus, a brutalist structure designed by Walter Netsch of the Chicago firm Skidmore, Owings and Merrill. Another master plan, designed in 1999 and updated in 2004, produced the Gerald Ratner Athletics Center (2003), the Max Palevsky Residential Commons (2001), South Campus Residence Hall and dining commons (2009), a new children's hospital, and other constructions, expansions, and restorations.

The site of Chicago Pile-1 is a National Historic Landmark and is marked by the Henry Moore sculpture Nuclear Energy. Robie House, a Frank Lloyd Wright building acquired by the University in 1963, is also National Historic Landmark, as is room 405 of the George Herbert Jones Laboratory, where Glenn T. Seaborg and his team were the first to isolate plutonium. Hitchcock Hall, an undergraduate dormitory, is on the National Register of Historic Places.

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