The site was originally the home of Alonso Stagg Field, named after the University’s legendary football coach who led the school during its years of Big Ten success. The University famously gave up varsity football in 1939 to assure its focus on academics. Three years later, beneath the stand of the little used stadium, Enrico Fermi achieved the first controlled and self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction. As such, the site is freighted with near mythological significance for the University and its self-image as an academic institution with a unique culture of intellectual inquiry. Much of the original fields and stands were extant when the University’s collections in the humanities and social sciences outgrew the capacity of its main facility, Harper Library, and plans to build a new library got underway. The building sits across 57th Street from the main quadrangles of the university, all of which were designed and constructed in a coherent “academic gothic style.” Two pairs of quadrangles extend south from the site of the Regenstein. A broad, east-west space, also enclosed and lined with gothic style academic buildings the divides the paired quadrangles. As a a result, the Regenstein Library sits directly on the main north-south axis of the campus and looks directly south, about 500 years, to the Rainey Harper Memorial Library, which is built on the Midway Plaissance of the Columbian Exposition. Construction of the University, founded in 1892, began as the Exposition was winding down. As the University’s first significant structure in fifty years (since the massive, gothic revival Rockefeller Chapel), its siting can now be seen as an important first step in what would become a program of northward expansion. The building also represented an important statement by the University. Intended a as premier graduate research facility – in scope and holdings, as well as in the accessibility of its collections – the building embodied ambitions to initiate a new era of growth for the school and to create a model, modern facility for elite academic institutions generally.

The University began the Regenstein Reconfiguration Project in 1990 with a series of space and usability studies that continued throughout the decade. The project was begun in 1998 and was completed in 2000. It included the installation of compact shelving that vastly increased capacity. Also, interior public and reading spaces were redesigned and reconfigured, and electrical, mechanical and networking systems were upgraded

The Regenstein remains the flagship facility of the University’s library system and – through its open and public spaces – provides a focal point on the campus for study and social interaction.

The building is in good condition.

An aggressive departure from the gothic architecture of the campus. Designed in the brutalist style, the building contrasts with gestures tothe rest of the campus. Comprising 577,000 square feet of interior space, its height is scaled to the older, campus buildings, while its irregular shape of thrusting bays and broken surfaces offset the massive footprint. The exterior walls, like the older buildings, are clad in Indiana limestone. The surfaces are scored by deep vertical grooves. The main entrance aligns exactly with the gated entrance to the quadrangles, is set into two thrusting bays, and is marked by three sets of vertical windows framed in dark steel. Its footprint, when seen from above, is an approximation of the shape of the map of United States.

Design and construction occurred from 1965 to 1970.

At the time of original construction, the Library was the northernmost, major academic site on campus. It dominated a two-square block area, which largely was open lawn space. Moreover its position outside of the enclosed quadrangles and directly opposite a gated entrance to the old campus, as well as its isolation in the midst of grassy open space, further emphasized its significance as a discrete, new, major academic site.

The seven-story building is constructed of reinforced concrete and clade in vertically scored limestone. Two stories are below grade. The lower basement rests on a concrete slab. The basement above that and all five stories above ground are waffle, pan slab. Maximum dimensions: 344 feet east-west, 411 feet north-south. Interior wals are bare, reinforced concrete. Each floor has a large central reading area in the center. Offices and individual and group study spaces are provided. A small atrium connects the reading areas on the second and third floors. The stacks are set apart on the west side of the building and accessible throughout.

A library and especially a new one, as the logical center of any campus and a symbol of its academic enterprise, will inevitably inscribe ideological assumptions onto the space it inhabits and the institution into whose existing, built environment it obtrudes. This is true of the University of Chicago and its Regenstein Library. The University was originally constructed alongside the Midway Plaissance of the Columbian Exposition. Olmstead’s sons initially laid out the site and its gardens along a largely axial Beaux Arts plan. Intended as a premier institution from the get go, dedicated to German style graduate study, and possessed of the largest endowment of any University at the time (thanks to the founding gift of John D. Rockefeller), the gothic style of its academic buildings also speaks to a romantic idealism and a desire to appropriate the appurtenances of academic tradition to the environment. Thorstein Veblen, who had been on the faculty at Chicago, harshly attacked what he considered its phony architecture, one intended to obtain the badges of “prestige” so important to the self-identification of what he called “the leisure class.” Beginning in the 1890’s and continuing throughout the next two decades, the construction of the gothic quadrangles coincided with the Gilded Age: the age of the consolidation of massive corporation, severe depressions and financial panics, and widening economic inequality. Veblen’s critique was part and parcel of his critique of the era and the attempts to secure legitimacy for powerful interests.Significantly, the period in which the Regenstein was designed and built coincided with another era (1965-1970) in which universities became intensely contested and politicized spaces. The roles of corporate influence, defense funded research, student rights as well as the beginning of a significant reshaping of student and faculty populations with respect to race and gender all marked the period. As result, the Regenstein must also be read as a response to the social conditions in which it was built.

The Library is a significant example of Brutalist architecture and a testament to the degree to which it had become the house style for academic buildings in the 1960’s and 1970’s. Paul Rudolph established the trend in Universities with his design for the Yale Art and Architecture Building. Universities quickly adapted it as a modernist response to the glass-curtain International style, one that stressed substance and monumentality.The Regenstein seeks to do these things but represents a series of ongoing compromises. A series of initial designs for the library paid direct homage to the academic gothic architecture that dominates the campus. These were first stripped down for later revision and then a final design emerged, which is employs a Brutalist strategy but in a non-doctrinaire way. For example, the exterior does not feature the raw concrete, the béton brut that gave the school its name. Although, from a distance, the limestone clad exterior walls do resemble concrete. On the other hand, expansive, unadorned concrete planes visibly and aggressively form the Regenstein’s interior walls, imposing their large, raw surfaces on the library’s users. These are a sharp departure from the wood paneled and wainscoted interiors of the campus’s gothic buildings, especially its old libraries.The building’s irregular shape, its thrusting bays and other ornaments were also a departure from the strong geometrically determined forms that mark so many other buildings of the style. As Netsch disclosed in an oral history for the Art Institute of Chicago, The Regenstein’s design accommodates both the gothic campus and the expressed wishes of the client, who rejected strict geometry, especially that of Netsch’s field theory”, as inappropriate for the environment.The constant negotiation between the old and the new also put the building in dialogue with the conflicting demands and implications at the heart of its style and of the University as an institution at that time. In that sense the Regenstein is paradigmatic of conflicting cultural and modernist impulses. On the one hand, its assertive mass and rawness constitute a post-modern response to the nostalgia and insincerity of the Library’s academic gothic surroundings, as well of their cloaking of the cultural power over meaning and knowledge with a sentimental and idealized vocabulary. On the other hand, the utopian impulse behind monumental, Brutalist, civic architecture – often criticized as blank, intrusive and off-putting – can also be seen as an authoritarian expression of corporatism and control at a time when Universities were also sites of cultural protest and resistance.

Much has already been said about the historical precursors to the Regenstein Library and about the context they create for both its design and its many potential meanings. However, the Regenstein also appears just at the beginning of an era when technology will not only create the first thoroughgoing revolution in the production and distribution of knowledge since the printing press but also raise unavoidable questions about the role of the library in this new environment as well as of the book itself … and not, coincidentally, of how the University must begin to reconceive itself and its plant as a center of knowledge creation. To this end, the continuing adaptations of the Regenstein, and especially the creation of the new Mansueto library with its underground storage for 3.5 million volumes, are especially revealing for the role of the library in a digital age.

The Regenstein Library is not an exceptional example of Brutalist academic architecture per se. It is not even foremost among Netsch’s buildings. His integrated, totalist vision for the University of Illinois Circle Campus, for example, provides a far more arresting instance of the contradictions at work between monumental civic space and authoritarian utopia. However, as an intervention into the environment one of the world’s leading research universities, and as the building that embodies the scholarly mission itself, the Regenstein Library’s negotiation of the many conflicting social, historical, cultural and aesthetic factors that ultimately are more or less resolved in the physical structure itself.

The Art Institute of Chicago. Oral History of Walter Netsch / Interviewd by Betty J. Blum. 1997. http://digital-libraries.saic.edu/cdm4/document.php?CISOROOT=%2Fcaohp&CISOPTR=19289&REC=3&CISOBOX=regenstein (accessed February 7, 2012).University of Chicago. The Joseph Regenstein Library Building. 2010. http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/e/reg/using/building.html (accessed February 17, 2012).Veblen, Thorstein. Theory of the Leisure Class. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.