IIT Studio News - Architecture and Landscape Come Together

ARCHITECTURE AND LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE COME TOGETHER TO REIMAGINE CLOSED BRONZEVILLE SCHOOLS

In 2013 the City of Chicago approved the closure of 49 public elementary schools, the largest school closure in United States history. Reports showed that the move was most detrimental to the students who were moved from the shuttered schools, approximately two-thirds of which remain unused.

Acknowledging the impact of the mass school closure of 2013, a fifth-year architecture studio, led by Illinois Institute of Technology College of Architecture professors Dirk Denison and Maria Villalobos Hernandez, seeks, in collaboration with Chicago Commissioner of Planning and Development Maurice Cox, to find new solutions through architecture, landscape architecture, and urbanism to turn the unused schools into new opportunities for the neighborhoods where they are located.

The studio focuses on two of those closed schools: Overton Elementary and Parkman Elementary. Both occupy spaces on the southwest corner of the Bronzeville neighborhood near the eight-lane Dan Ryan Expressway and are separated from each other by a tract of land that was formerly part of the Robert Taylor Homes. Overton, designed in the 1960s by Chicago architecture firm Perkins+Will, is a Modernist, three-story building consisting of three glass and gloss brick towers, while Dwight H. Perkins created Parkman’s 1912 neo-traditional design.