Exploring Chicago’s LOST Elevated Walkways

Pedestrian Highway in Chicago was a massive system of walkways connecting buildings in the city's largest university. For 30 years, the sprawling canopy of concrete and granite ushered thousands of students between classes, it hosted protests, and it even served as a location for films. But as the time caught up to it, it began to deteriorate and maintenance became increasingly difficult. This is until the decision was made to tear it down, and today only scars, stubby remnants, and photographs remain. But we're going to rebuild this piece of urban infrastructure in the computer and see what it would have been like to experience this bold, innovative, but ultimately ill-fated design. Stay tuned. Hello, my name is Stuart Hicks and I teach architecture design studios and lecture courses at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Long before I started teaching here, the campus looked totally differently than it does today. It used to be covered with an entire elevated walkway system that would take you from one building to the next. Today, that huge system exists only in photographs and in urban legend. And we mostly enter buildings today on the ground floor, which is not where the architect intended us to. After years of navigating the campus in its current state, I wanted to see what it would have been like to navigate this pedestrian highway. So we built the entire thing in the computer in order to walk through it in real time using a program called Enscape. And there is a link in the description below that will take you to this model so that you can explore it yourself in your browser window. The video is broken into segments along the timeline because I'm also going to tell you about the history of this massive project, analyze its original design, and then offer some of my thoughts on its demolition. So without any further ado, let's dive into the brutalist pedestrian highway beginning with the timeline. University of Illinois Circle Campus was designed and built just southwest of the Chicago Loop in the mid 1960s by the architect Walter Netsch, working with the firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. Walter Netsch was born in 1920 in Chicago and attended MIT from 1939 to 1943. He began working for Skidmore, Owings & Merrill in 1947, where he'd eventually become a partner until his retirement in 1979. During his time at SOM, Netsch would be responsible for the design of some notable and important buildings like the Inland Steel Building in 1957. It was the first skyscraper built in Chicago in the Loop after World War II. And this is after decades of a skyscraper drought. And so the building type had to be reinvented and Netsch questioned what a skyscraper should be at a real fundamental level. And he did this by locating all vertical elements like structure and elevators outside of the main part of the building. Also around this time, Netsch was working on the Air Force Academy campus in Colorado Springs, modeled and arranged to increase interactions between the cadets. This area was also designed on a strict modular grid of seven feet that is based on the size of the bed in a dorm room. This idea of a strict module would remain an obsession for the architect even at UIC, which didn't begin design until the early 1960s. Of course, the Air Force campus also houses the chapel as its crown jewel and Netsch's most famous building design. The chapel is made of aluminum clad spires in the shape of tetrahedrons that also serve as the structure of the building. The UIC circle campus was built as an instant campus to house a projected 32,000 students. This new home was conceived after the university outgrew its home at Navy Pier. It takes its name from the expressway interchange to its northeast. Construction was phased, but it took an astonishingly short amount of time for such a large undertaking. Phase one saw the construction of the walkways, while phase three and four included buildings that were part of Netsch's field theory, a design strategy that used overlays of rotated squares to produce buildings with complex interconnections. After 25 years, the walkways' internal heating elements no longer worked. The salt from fighting Chicago winters ate away the concrete stairs, making much of the walkways inaccessible. And all this deterioration occurred until 1993, when the walkway began the process of demolition, which would take a total of six years. Majority of the granite that was damaged during the demolition was donated to the city of Chicago, which used it to build an artificial reef at 57th Street and Lakeshore Drive. I personally think that the walkway fits into various ways that the city of Chicago works. In the broadest sense, this is a hugely bold experiment. I mean, this is the city that reversed the flow of the river, and it raised all of the streets and the buildings like 10 or 20 feet just to have sewers. And this walkway system, you know, it certainly doesn't register on that scale of bold infrastructural projects, but it's certainly no small feat. But to design an entire urban campus for this many people in this small of a site, it had never been attempted before. The pedestrian expressway was a solution to the planned 32,000 students, which were expected on a relatively tight site of only about 100 acres. Of course, this projected density and then this number of students, it was never achieved. And so that made the walkway seem like overkill even from the outset. It's also like Chicago in other ways, because the city has other layered systems of movement like Wacker Drive, which is party on top and business on the bottom. I didn't sign up for this. There's also an underground pedway system here in Chicago, which is an underground walkway, also featured in Batman. But you know what movie the UIC walkways were featured in? Candyman. They live in the sewers now. Some of them are 30 feet long. Where did this happen? In Miami. They went blind in Albino from living in the dark. The design for the campus begins here at the Forum, which was considered the heart where the students would meet in the largest groups. Then the campus is designed like ripples in water when a stone is dropped in a pond. At the center is where the buildings are located for the lectures, so the largest groups of students. And then there are classroom buildings around those, and then specialized buildings for science and architecture and things like that. The campus is relatively large as a kind of construction project, and it was built quickly. And to achieve this level of intricate coordination, it's a big investment. Its scale is one reason for its downfall, though. It's inflexible. Cities and campuses are living things that are constantly changing and need adapting. It exemplifies a top-down way of thinking, where a design is imposed at the outset rather than to develop gradually over time from the bottom up. This is also probably a good time to mention that this project displaced thousands of people and businesses that were already there as part of the fabric of Chicago. This campus and its walkway is certainly fraught with dubious and very complicated political decision-making all around and all through its history. The overall design has a clear distinction between major and minor axes. These break away in a very tree-like way and curl around at the dead ends, even when they terminate right next to the main artery. They don't connect back. Just like the Air Force Academy, which preceded it in Netsch's work, the campus follows a strict modular structure based on 20-foot squares. This is not a very large module for concrete construction, so there seems to be a lot of columns here, way more than there are today. Walter Netsch would make analogies to forests or forests of columns, and this is reinforced when he placed trees right at every column. The design features multiple kinds of symmetry and asymmetry. Bilateral symmetry, which is basically when something is mirrored across a line, and radial symmetry, when something is rotated and copied. These strong bits of symmetry are counteracted by off-axis entries and exits that create a rotational or pinwheel movement around the forum area. We modeled the walkways in a program called Rhino. Modeling them was a chore, because it's a big project. But luckily, there's a lot of copying, both with the modules and with the symmetry. So it's possible to make one thing, rotate it around four times, or to make one column and copy it lots of times. We also have access to the original drawings, making it pretty easy to build off of the architect's original intentions. Walking around this model is really surreal. I know this place so well, but it's like I'm seeing it for the first time. I have to imagine that we're losing a lot with a 3D model. It simply can't be as detailed as it would need to be to capture all the textures of the entirety of the campus. Even armed with that knowledge, the campus and the walkway are extremely vast. The placement and location of buildings don't provide a sense of enclosure, because we're only seeing the tops of them. It's like our view skips over the tops of buildings, like stones skipping on a pond. The space feels completely monumental. The long axis is so straight and goes on for so long. It sets up really awkward relationships between others as we're always totally exposed. Walking towards someone along this long axis, staring into someone's eyes as we approach them, I could imagine would feel kind of weird. The forum is almost blindingly light colored, increasing the sense of feelings of enclosure. There are mounds that go up and some that go down. And I can see the architect's mind at work here, offering these objects and sort of landscapes to prompt different forms of collective gathering of various types. So people could come here and encounter different shapes, and maybe those shapes promote different types of relationships between the people. To an architect, this might seem generous and open-ended, but visitors probably feel very consumed by this whole structure, and uninterested in engaging, because they're so exposed. All this exposure happens on top, but when we're underneath, we're almost completely concealed. It's dark, and there's way too many columns down here. It feels like I'm in Lower Wacker Drive of Chicago, but when I'm there, at least I'm in a car. There are actually two kinds of columns. There are the twisted kind at the central forum, and then there's the rectangular ones at the long stretches. Maybe the twisting ones are too expensive to have everywhere. All in all, I am really glad that we got to do this. I have a new appreciation for all of the challenges of designing and running an urban campus, but also for the architect. Walter Netsch and the UIC campus are figures that can be vilified for all sorts of reasons. The brutalist architecture can feel alienating, and it can come across as defensive and inhuman sometimes. No matter what the architect's intentions were, architecture and building, they need to live on on their own without apology or without explanation. However, my stance is that I appreciate and I respect bold experiments. I don't expect them to go right all the time, but I support leaving room for experimentation, which also means leaving room for some failures. I also believe in constantly assessing the successes and failures of the built environment and moving forward. It was probably a good move to demolish the walkways, but I do find it pretty sad. They could have probably been removed in a way that still celebrated the overall vision a little bit more. There have also been a lot of additions to the campus since then. Some are great and some not so great, and some don't really work well with the vision that was intended by the architect. But here we are. So the idea, I think, is to do the best with what we have and to learn our lessons. And now you too can walk through this monumental urban infrastructure and experience what it would have been like if you came to Chicago in the 1980s. If you liked this video and this project of resurrecting demolished or unbuilt architecture, please consider giving this video a like. Maybe even subscribe to the channel. And while you're doing all that, tell me what you think about this project in the discussion below, and maybe check out some of these other videos over here somewhere. See ya, everybody.