Designing the future of urban learning

Home News Articles Designing the future of urban learning

Through ChiDesign, an open international ideas competition, CAC explored this question: “Can education and cultural partners come together under one roof to create a new model for learning in Chicago?”

The ChiDesign competition challenged entrants to submit design solutions for a proposed Center for Architecture, Design and Education (CADE). Their submissions would bring design principles to bear in developing ways of transforming urban dilemmas into unique educational opportunities, providing a framework for defining the future of the urban campus.

As an out-of-school educational resource itself, CAC is deeply invested in promoting dialogue on designs for education that go beyond a traditional classroom’s confines. For us, ChiDesign was another way of creating space for community connections and a sense of the city as classroom for the next generation of learners. Included as a ChiDesign competition resource was CAC’s “Changing the Outcomes” white paper, the result of a daylong forum that explored the future of school design principles. “Changing the Outcomes” delivered a set of key recommendations, which included:

  • Collaborative, flexible, transparent spaces
  • Use of the surrounding neighborhood as an extension of the school campus
  • Free and easy access to public transportation from home, to school and beyond
  • Engagement in meaningful work alongside—and under the mentorship of—professionals

As a way of exploring the ideas and inventions of ChiDesign, we’re taking a look at how those same recommendations appeared as recurring themes across several of ChiDesign’s inspired entries.

Planning collaborative, flexible, transparent spaces

ChiDesign produced an array of approaches to this recommendation, with translucent glass rooms, galleries and facades appearing in abundance. The most prominent feature of “The Oculus” proposal for CADE is an enormous, portal-like aperture, which opens onto a Central Grand Exhibition space; the striking scale of this open gallery makes it naturally flexible, as well as inviting to collaborations of many kinds. The “Layered Intelligence” entry addressed a similar topic from a very different angle, providing for key spaces that “spill out into public circulation avenues.” Within its building, stairs would “play a large role in providing collective spaces.”

Using the neighborhood as an extension of the school campus

How should a building invite students out-of-doors, to the perimeter of their schooling center and into interaction with the city around them? “Tinkerability” included an “Urban Foyer” concept, a street-level welcoming space which could transform the relationship between indoor and outdoor, as allowed by Chicago’s changeable weather. “A School Is Not a Building” addressed the same question by opening the entire ground floor of its transparent complex onto connected urban space, providing “an immediate relationship [with] downtown Chicago.”

Free and easy access to public transportation

A range of ChiDesign competitors addressed the crucial transit question indirectly, providing imagery in their proposals that emphasized the importance of location, location, and location—specifically, a location that’s conveniently adjacent to a train stop. “Soft in the Middle” included a prospective view of its modular skyscraper as seen from one of Chicago’s “L” train lines, while “Unveiled” placed its own unique facade behind elevated tracks, just as commuter rail cars speed by.

Providing meaningful work alongside professionals

Connecting learners to adult experts in the fields that interest them was a goal for several submissions. “Soft in the Middle” detailed a massive “collaborative core” in the CADE building’s center, envisioned as a connected set of work and educational spaces—classrooms, performance spaces, professional headquarters and more—that would help all of the building’s users toward encounters with one another. And in one telling diagram, “A School Is Not a Building,” placed itself within a “network of cultural attractors that help define downtown Chicago,” linking students and working adults across the city’s theaters, museums, and libraries.