What Can Universities Do With Their Fancy New Event Centers?
Many colleges invested in grand convening spaces to host conferences. But with indoor gatherings off-limits, these showpiece buildings need new roles on campus.
The University of Chicago’s David Rubenstein Forum, designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, is one of several university event centers to open in recent years.
Photo: Brett Beyer/University of Chicago
In normal times, the Isadore and Sadie Dorin Forum at the University of Illinois at Chicago hosted speeches from Vice President Joe Biden, the Chicago Humanities Festival and candidate forums for the city’s mayoral election. With event space capacity for 3,000 people, the building, designed by HOK and completed in 2008, is the largest such venue on campus. But when the Covid-19 pandemic began, the school had to rapidly grapple with if and how its largest event spaces could be used. So in the fall of 2020, instead of welcoming conferences and symposia, the UIC Forum was converted into an ad hoc health facility; its vast main hall and meeting rooms have been repurposed to dole out socially distanced Covid-19 tests and flu shots for students and employees.
Grand university convening spaces are part of a nascent higher-ed trend — large, expensive facilities unattached to any specific academic discipline, often designed by high-profile, globe-trotting architects provided with generous budgets. Thanks to a kind of venue-building arms race between schools, these kinds of spaces have proliferated on campuses nationwide in the last 10 or 20 years.