Content area
Full Text
MOORE RUBLE YUDELL AND GLASERWORKS INSERT A LONG, DYNAMIC STRUCTURE INTO A TIGHT SITE, BINDING A CAMPUS AND COMMUNITY TOGETHER.
For more than a decade, the University of Cincinnati has endeavored to create a campus fit for full-time students at what was once mostly a commuter college. Now, tucked into the heart of the school's academic campus, the Joseph A. Steger Student Life Center establishes connections via enclosed pedestrian paths, arcades, passageways, and terraced gardens. The architects embraced a difficult site stylishly, bringing a rugged, up-to-date urbanity with a West Coast flavor to the Midwest by overlapping interior and exterior spaces, employing lots of natural light, and boldly juxtaposing brick, metal, and concrete surfaces.
Program
In 1989, the university implemented a Signature Architects Program intended to put the school on the national map with brazen new buildings by architects such as Frank Gehry, Peter Eisenman, and Michael Graves. Late in the 1990s, the second phase of this program began; unlike the first, its goal is to provide a "quality of campus life" the school still lacked. A 2000 master plan by landscape architect George Hargreaves envisioned a lively pedestrian "Main Street" in the middle of campus that would act as an antidote to the earlier emphasis on isolated academic buildings. The Steger Center was commissioned and built under this rubric. Sited on a long, narrow lot that was once a driveway, the center's program called for a student health center, coffee shop, student organizations, and computer lab, and was intended to connect open spaces and existing buildings with the renovated Tangeman University Center (the student union) by...