NEIU is attracting a lot of eyes with the flashy new El Centro
“If you’ve driven the Kennedy Expressway this year, chances are good that you’ve spotted Northeastern Illinois University’s flashy new $27 million campus outpost, El Centro, perched above the east side of the highway at Kimball, just where the Kennedy takes a major bend. Even before the building got its gleaming fins, it was a striking sight, a big, boomerang-shaped whale of a structure looming over the traffic as if it had just landed from outer space.
Now that it’s complete, it’s a stunner, a color- and shape-shifter that—thanks to those bicolored fins—presents a rippling gold face to the highway if you’re driving toward downtown and turns blue (blue and gold are NEIU’s colors) if you’re headed the other way. Working with a three-acre industrial site wedged between railroad tracks and the freeway, architect Juan Gabriel Moreno of the Chicago-based firm JGMA has created a futuristic glass castle of learning that embraces and exploits its king-of-the-road location. From the outside, it has far greater impact than its relatively modest size—three stories, 66,000 square feet—should generate. And the airy inside is just as striking, with sweeping, hypnotic views of multiple lanes of racing traffic from almost every hallway and room. I don’t know what it’ll do for classroom attention spans, but the effect is like a glass-capsule dive into the midst of a giant aquarium.
The building includes 17 classrooms (all shallow and wide, so no one is far from the front), a 40-station computer lab, a couple of beautifully equipped science labs, a top-floor lounge with skyline views and a patio, a large main-floor suite of administrative offices, and a library resource center that won’t have any books except those that students request, which will come on loan from other campuses. Each classroom has twin video screens that with the use of an app will immediately display whatever a student wants to share from his or her phone. NEIU president Sharon Hahs has said that this building “literally” raises “the profile of our university,” and both she and Moreno have noted more bluntly that it will function as a billboard for NEIU, getting in the face of the 400,000 cars that pass by every day.”
Isaacs, Deanna. Chicago Reader 9 October 2014.