Infinite Curve: Viñoly's Chapel at the U of C Center for Care and Discovery

When we wrote about the new Logan Center for the Performing Arts at the University of Chicago at the time of its opening last fall, we included this view towards of Rafael Viñoly's Center for Care and Discovery, the $700 million, 240 bed hospital whose massive bulk looming over the U of C campus we described as looking “like a beached ocean liner”.

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In Viñoly's defense, he was working with the University's program, which stressed the kind of supply-chain empire-building that is a dominant force of our time in general and in health care in particular.  As I learned from a generous and informative tour from Viñoly Architects Project Manager Joe Cliggott earlier this month, Viñoly's exterior design incorporatea a number of features to break up the monolithic quality, as well as a highly creative approach to making the hospital experience more - well, hospitable - for care givers, patients, and visitors alike.  I hope to cover these in more detail in a later post. (And also the new Carol Ross Barney daycare center you can glimpse in the bottom right of the photo below.)

While during my tour I learned any number of things that impressed me, today I want to take a look at the one feature that surprised me, and in a very positive way.  It's the chapel on the seventh floor ‘Garden’, the sky lobby encompassing waiting and support rooms for visitors, which are not only gracious, but provide some of the most spectacular views in Chicago.

The chapel is a counterpoint to so much of the rest the design.  In the larger design, the right angle, save for rounded columns, predominates, relentlessly.  In contrast, in the chapel, the right angle is banished, even in its expression on the exterior of the building.

The wall facing the lobby curves.  The entrance door is not immediately apparent.  You look at the wall and place your bets, but you know immediately when you find it, by the feel on your hand of the thin, hidden strip of metal near the edge, whose cool, smooth texture is a shock to the touch compared to the texture and temperature of the otherwise omnipresent wood.  The cherry wood veneer is in striking contrast to the celebration of metal, glass, and applied color in the rest of the hospital.

Once you enter the chapel and close the door behind you, you are in interfaith room completely unmarked by any religious imagery.  The objects - whether they be sacred or seating - required by individual religions are stored behind another hidden door in a small closet that bumps into the room as if stretching the unbroken banding of wood.  Above that wood, a band of white wall and a narrow continuous strip of clerestory windows wraps around the top of the room.

There are no right angles in this room.  If you can imagine away the rude but code-required Exit sign, it's as if you find yourself in  a space where you don't how you got there, or how you'll get out.  The acoustic seal creates one of those places where you actually ‘hear’ the silence.  Occasional sounds from the lobby filter in, muffled and distant, as if you're hearing them underwater.  Although the placement of the closet ‘bump‘ subtly demarcates a visual focus towards the ‘alter‘ area, the chapel, ultimately, is an ever continuous space.  No beginning.  No end.  It just ‘is’.  A sanctuary, filled from above with celestial light.  A glimpse of eternity, claustrophobic, until you give yourself over to its serenity.

In alternating succession, the experience of Viñoly's chapel can be both unsettling and comforting.  I like this space.

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Rafael Viñoly talks Wright, new hospital, at the Logan Center for the Arts

Rafael Viñoly talks Wright, new hospital, at the Logan Center for the Arts

click images for larger view

Architect Rafael Viñoly was at the University of Chicago last night, speaking in the Performance Hall of the new Tod Williams/Billie Tsien Reva and David Logan Center for Arts, about to open with its own Logan Launch Festival this Friday through Saturday.  (Normally, I'd link to the architect's website, but the Rafael Viñoly Architects url is currently popping up a malware alert, so here's a link to his Wikipedia entry.)

Viñoly gave a preview of the thinking behind the newly christened University of Chicago Center for Care and Discovery, a $700 million, 10-story, 1.2 million square foot facility scheduled to open early next year.  The design is based on a 31'6" x 31'6" x 18' basic module extruded out to a building that's 570 feet long, 180 feet wide, and 198 feet high.  The actual inpatient rooms are on the top three floors, just above an inset sky lobby, providing both patients and visitors views out over the rooftops of the University and, to the north, the complete Chicago skyline.

I hope to be writing a lot more about this structure as we near the opening.  (Right now I'm working on finishing up my interview/tour with Tod Williams and Billie Tsien of the Logan Center.) For the moment, we'll just give you a little bit of Viñoly talking about Frank Lloyd Wright's Robie House . . .

. . . which was brilliantly reflected in Viñoly's own design for the Booth School of Business, just across the street . . .

 Says Viñoly . . .

Architecture is the art of the specific. There’s nothing open-ended or undetermined in architecture. It’s not, as some people used to say in the early 70’s, an autonomous discipline. There couldn’t be anything less autonomous than architecture. There’s money involved, there’s uses involved, there’s science, technology, a number of things which are more exactly parallel to the kinds of instruments and use of information than to the mastery of the craft as it happens in traditional visual art.

I think that what is remarkable in Wright’s work is the fact that he wasn’t doing the Prairie Style simply as a stylistic approach. He was pursuing a research on a proportional system and overall a compositional system that wasn’t even actually invented up until that point. If you put that in context with what was happening in Europe, it’s also a completely different approach than what modernism was based on, which was in appropriating images and ideas from painting and from the traditional arts and try to create a reality, a new philosophy.

What the Robie House does is fundamentally investigate the one thing I think unifies all architecture, which is the phenomenally subtle play of proportions and scale.

Viñoly's lecture was sponsored by Frank Lloyd Wright Preservation Trust, and was an early event this this year's edition of the incredible Chicago Ideas Week.