An Illini Place
An Illini Place

Author: Lex Tate

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 2017-04-17

Total Pages: 725

ISBN-13: 0252099818

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Why does the University of Illinois campus at Urbana-Champaign look as it does today? Drawing on a wealth of research and featuring more than one hundred color photographs, An Illini Place provides an engrossing and beautiful answer to that question. Lex Tate and John Franch trace the story of the university's evolution through its buildings. Oral histories, official reports, dedication programs, and developmental plans both practical and quixotic inform the story. The authors also provide special chapters on campus icons and on the buildings, arenas and other spaces made possible by donors and friends of the university. Adding to the experience is a web companion that includes profiles of the planners, architects, and presidents instrumental in the campus's growth, plus an illustrated inventory of current and former campus plans and buildings.

The University of Illinois
The University of Illinois

Author: Frederick E Hoxie

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 2017-02-07

Total Pages: 967

ISBN-13: 025209932X

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The founding of the university in 1867 created a unique community in what had been a prairie. Within a few years, this creative mix of teachers and scholars produced innovations in agriculture, engineering and the arts that challenged old ideas and stimulated dynamic new industries. Projects ranging from the Mosaic web browser to the discovery of Archaea and pioneering triumphs in women's education and wheelchair accessibility have helped shape the university's mission into a double helix of innovation and real-world change. These essays explore the university's celebrated accomplishments and historic legacy, candidly assessing both its successes and its setbacks. Experts and students tell the eye-opening stories of campus legends and overlooked game-changers, of astonishing technical and social invention, of incubators of progress as diverse as the Beckman Institute and Ebertfest. Contributors: James R. Barrett, George O. Batzli, Claire Benjamin, Jeffrey D. Brawn, Jimena Canales, Stephanie A. Dick, Poshek Fu, Marcelo H. Garcia, Lillian Hoddeson, Harry Liebersohn, Claudia Lutz, Kathleen Mapes, Vicki McKinney, Elisa Miller, Robert Michael Morrissey, Bryan E. Norwood, Elizabeth H. Pleck, Leslie J. Reagan, Susan M. Rigdon, David Rosenboom, Katherine Skwarczek, Winton U. Solberg, Carol Spindel, William F. Tracy, and Joy Ann Williamson-Lott.

Accessible America
Accessible America

Author: Bess Williamson

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2020-05-01

Total Pages: 290

ISBN-13: 1479802492

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A history of design that is often overlooked—until we need it Have you ever hit the big blue button to activate automatic doors? Have you ever used an ergonomic kitchen tool? Have you ever used curb cuts to roll a stroller across an intersection? If you have, then you’ve benefited from accessible design—design for people with physical, sensory, and cognitive disabilities. These ubiquitous touchstones of modern life were once anything but. Disability advocates fought tirelessly to ensure that the needs of people with disabilities became a standard part of public design thinking. That fight took many forms worldwide, but in the United States it became a civil rights issue; activists used design to make an argument about the place of people with disabilities in public life. In the aftermath of World War II, with injured veterans returning home and the polio epidemic reaching the Oval Office, the needs of people with disabilities came forcibly into the public eye as they never had before. The US became the first country to enact federal accessibility laws, beginning with the Architectural Barriers Act in 1968 and continuing through the landmark Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990, bringing about a wholesale rethinking of our built environment. This progression wasn’t straightforward or easy. Early legislation and design efforts were often haphazard or poorly implemented, with decidedly mixed results. Political resistance to accommodating the needs of people with disabilities was strong; so, too, was resistance among architectural and industrial designers, for whom accessible design wasn’t “real” design. Bess Williamson provides an extraordinary look at everyday design, marrying accessibility with aesthetic, to provide an insight into a world in which we are all active participants, but often passive onlookers. Richly detailed, with stories of politics and innovation, Williamson’s Accessible America takes us through this important history, showing how American ideas of individualism and rights came to shape the material world, often with unexpected consequences.

Designing for Diversity
Designing for Diversity

Author: Kathryn H. Anthony

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 2021-08-18

Total Pages: 286

ISBN-13: 025205282X

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Providing hard data for trends that many perceive only vaguely and some deny altogether, Designing for Diversity reveals a profession rife with gender and racial discrimination and examines the aspects of architectural practice that hinder or support the full participation of women and persons of color. Drawing on interviews and surveys of hundreds of architects, Kathryn H. Anthony outlines some of the forms of discrimination that recur most frequently in architecture: being offered added responsibility without a commensurate rise in position, salary, or credit; not being allowed to engage in client contact, field experience, or construction supervision; and being confined to certain kinds of positions, typically interior design for women, government work for African Americans, and computer-aided design for Asian American architects. Anthony discusses the profession's attitude toward flexible schedules, part-time contracts, and the demands of family and identifies strategies that have helped underrepresented individuals advance in the profession, especially establishing a strong relationship with a mentor. She also observes a strong tendency for underrepresented architects to leave mainstream practice, either establishing their own firms, going into government or corporate work, or abandoning the field altogether. Given the traditional mismatch between diverse consumers and predominantly white male producers of the built environment, plus the shifting population balance toward communities of color, Anthony contends that the architectural profession staves off true diversity at its own peril. Designing for Diversity argues convincingly that improving the climate for nontraditional architects will do much to strengthen architecture as a profession. Practicing architects, managers of firms, and educators will learn how to create conditions more welcoming to a diversity of users as well as designers of the built environment.

Murphy/Jahn
Murphy/Jahn

Author: Murphy/Jahn (Firm)

Publisher: Images Publishing

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 268

ISBN-13: 9781876907143

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In this book, Helmut Jahn is revealed as an architect committed to exploring the material and perceptual possibilities of creating architecture in a new millennium, one with 'a simplicity of form and construction and a clear expression of its component p

Lorado Taft
Lorado Taft

Author: Allen Stuart Weller

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 2014-10-15

Total Pages: 361

ISBN-13: 0252096460

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Sculptor Lorado Taft helped build Chicago's worldwide reputation as the epicenter of the City Beautiful Movement. In this new biography, art historian Allen Stuart Weller picks up where his earlier book Lorado in Paris left off, drawing on the sculptor's papers to generate a fascinating account of the most productive and influential years of Taft's long career. Returning to Chicago from France, Taft established a bustling studio and began a twenty-one-year career as an instructor at the Art Institute, succeeded by three decades as head of the Midway Studios at the University of Chicago. This triumphant era included ephemeral sculpture for the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition; a prolific turn-of-the-century period marked by the gold-medal-winning The Solitude of the Soul; the 1913 Fountain of the Great Lakes; the 1929 Alma Mater at the University of Illinois; and large-scale projects such as his ambitious program for Chicago's Midway with the monumental Fountain of Time. In addition, the book charts Taft's mentoring of women artists, including the so-called White Rabbits at the World's Fair, many of whom went on to achieve artistic success. Lavishly illustrated with color images of Taft's most celebrated works, Lorado Taft: The Chicago Years completes the first major study of a great American artist.

The University of Illinois Memorial Stadium
The University of Illinois Memorial Stadium

Author: Kevin Hinders

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-10-28

Total Pages: 560

ISBN-13: 1040143873

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This book offers a rigorous but graphically compelling narrative historic analysis of one of the most important civic buildings not only of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, or the State of Illinois, but arguably of the United States, Memorial Stadium. Like all spatial products, the design and construction of the University of Illinois Memorial Stadium embodies the social, political, economic, aspiration, and aesthetic values of its time. This book will engage in critical analysis including documenting the civic discourse that led to the Stadium and thereafter explore the iterative nature of the Stadium in shaping civic discourse. In this vein, central topics include its role in embodying the state’s economic growth; the changing nature of the sociocultural tendencies and its impact on campus life and the University’s community; the Stadium’s effects on UIUC sports and the campus’ built environment; the rise of College sports as big business; and the impact on mass culture across the State and the country, like the use of stadiums as concert venues and place of public discourse. More than a simple study of the building’s conceptualization, design, and construction, this book reveals why Illinois’ Memorial Stadium is an iconic part of the American Midwest’s built landscape and in many ways part of the American mythic landscape. This will be interesting reading for all those familiar with the building, as well as all students and scholars of sports architecture.