Film student Dimitri Moore at the site where Columbia's Media Production Center will be constructed. Photo: Mary Farmilant (M.F.A. '05).

In its 118-year history, Columbia College Chicago has never built an academic building.

It’s astonishing, really. From the Columbia School of Oratory’s first digs in 1890 at 24 East Adams Street to its current campus comprising 17 academic buildings and five residence halls, the college has been masterful in its reuse and recycling of existing structures. It was a partner, with other universities, in the construction of a “superdorm” at the corner of State Street and Harrison. But it has never constructed a building of its own.

That will change in January 2009, when construction crews break ground at the corner of 16th and State Streets, the site of Columbia’s new Media Production Center. An innovative, 35,500-square-foot facility comprising two sound stages, a motion-capture studio, an animation lab, four classrooms, and spaces for production design, costumes, and equipment storage, it will be a building designed from the ground up to accommodate a new way of teaching filmmaking and media production. And it all started with an elevator ride.

It was late September 2001, and Bruce Sheridan was in an elevator. Sheridan had just moved halfway around the world from his native New Zealand to chair the film and video department at Columbia College Chicago, lured to the American Midwest by the potential he saw in Columbia to create a new paradigm, a new way of teaching filmmaking. “Warrick Carter [Columbia’s president] walked into the elevator,” recalls Sheridan. “The doors closed and Warrick said, ‘We’ve got to build a studio.’”

Sheridan agreed. But he also knew that to do it right would require a groundbreaking approach. “Film schools were all just created out of what already existed,” he said. “I wanted to start a new conversation. Rather than keep on doing what we already did, why shouldn’t we take that moment and say if we were starting from zero—magic wand time—what would a film school look like? And that’s how it started—with a conversation in an elevator.”

The need for production space was glaring. “Almost all of our advanced filming was taking place off-site, it was all location shooting,” says Sheridan. “How can you have the biggest film school in the world and all the shooting’s done in Grant Park in the snow?”

Sheridan and Carter weren’t the first ones to recognize the lack of a proper sound stage as a liability for the school. “When Chap Freeman and I were co-chairs of the film department, in the ’90s, we were on a quest to find a sound stage where we could actually teach directing—we didn’t even have that,” says Doreen Bartoni, now dean of the School of Media Arts. “It was one of the things that Dr. Carter noticed as a major absence when he came to Columbia.”

“I arrived at Columbia in 2000,” says Carter, “and as I got a better sense of who we were and what we were trying to do as a college, it became obvious that while we might have been the largest film program in the country, we didn’t have all that we needed to be the best. We had the best faculty; we had really well-prepared, innovative, creative students; we had the diversity that is so important to us; and we had course offerings that covered the whole scope of what is required in the industry. We had all of that. But what we didn’t have was a proper group of sound stages.” Carter recalls the elevator conversation as vividly as Sheridan does. “From that point on,” he says, “we’ve been on a mission.”

By spring 2010, that mission will be accomplished. Construction begins this winter on the $21-million building, designed by Studio Gang Architects. It is a groundbreaking moment for Columbia on several levels. It is the college’s first new-construction academic building, and the first educational facility of its kind anywhere. It is designed by a young architect whom Metropolis magazine has called “bold and ingenious” and Stanley Tigerman has dubbed “as good an architect as they get.” It is a manifestation of a new, collaborative model of arts and media education that the college has been developing for years. And it is supported by a successful fundraising campaign, led by several $1-million-plus gifts from members of the college’s board of trustees. It is made possible, says Sheridan, by a fortuitous convergence of “the right people in the right place at the right time.”

Bartoni agrees. She is dean of the School of Media Arts, which comprises the three primary departments—film and video, interactive arts and media, and television—the building is designed to serve. She is quick to point out, however, that many more departments, including journalism, audio arts and acoustics, dance, and art and design, will benefit from the facility as well. “I’ve always thought that within the School of Media Arts, one of our guiding principles is the collaborative nature of our disciplines,” she says. “This process has been a model example of collaboration and willingness to always put our students first, to always think, ‘what is best for our students?’”

“What’s come out of that process,” says Michael Niederman, chair of the television department, “is a building that I like to think is as smart as the people who are involved in the design of it. It’s really designed to adapt and transform as we need it, and that’s an ideal educational space.”

The clincher to realizing the project, says Bartoni, was getting total support from the board of trustees. “Really, when you talk about convergence, you have to credit Allen Turner.” Turner, a partner in The Pritzker Organization, became chairman of Columbia’s board of trustees in 2005. As chairman of the board of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago he oversaw the construction of the museum’s new building in the 1990s, and is founding trustee of the Pritzker Architecture Prize. It was Turner, Bartoni believes, who provided the catalyst to bring the project to fruition. “He saw the larger potential in this,” she says. “He had the vision to do an architectural selection contest. He saw this as an amazing opportunity to not only fulfill an educational need, but to highlight and raise the profile of the school.”

Alicia Berg, formerly commissioner of the Chicago Department of Planning and Development, joined the Columbia team in 2004 as vice president of Campus Environment. “We were working on the Campus Master Plan [a long-term vision for the physical campus] when Allen became chair,” says Berg. “He really got it. He understood how to build consensus on the board.” She also credits Turner for bringing people to the table like Martha Thorne, executive director of the Pritzker Architecture Prize, who helped construct a list of 30 architectural firms that would be invited to submit qualifications. Howard Sulkin, fresh from a similar building project as president of the Spertus Institute for Jewish Studies, and Bob Wislow, chairman of the international commercial real estate firm U.S. Equities and a member of Columbia’s board of trustees, were also instrumental in establishing a selection process that allowed the committee to really get to know the architects, says Berg.

It was through that process that the college selected Studio Gang Architects, a relatively young Chicago firm headed by Jeanne Gang and Mark Schendel. “We had a really fun meeting at Jeanne’s office,” says Berg. “You could just tell that they were very collaborative and that our cultures really meshed.” Gang came on board with the project just as her practice with Studio Gang was rocketing her to “starchitect” status. Studio Gang has received accolades for a number of innovative projects, including the Bengt Sjostrom Starlight Theatre in Rockford, Illinois; the Ford Calumet Environmental Center in Calumet, Illinois; and the SOS Children’s Village in Chicago. Aqua, an 82-story skyscraper under construction in downtown Chicago, has captured the attention and imagination of a city that takes its skyscrapers very seriously. Despite the attention she’s gaining for Aqua, which will be one of the tallest buildings in Chicago, Gang seems completely engaged with the challenge of designing Columbia’s single-story Media Production Center. “I don’t treat this project differently than a big project, like building Aqua or something,” she insists. “It’s just as important to me. Especially because it’s on State Street, it’s Columbia College, it’s a public building in the sense that people are going to be coming into it all the time. It’s going to be seen.”

Gang’s concept for the building grew out of a dialogue with Bartoni, Carter, Berg, and others about the educational needs the building must serve. She and her team studied the processes of film and media production, trying to gain a deep understanding of the requirements their design would need to fulfill. “What has become the most interesting thing for us,” says Gang, “is realizing how much there is in common between making films and making architecture. When we think about space, we think about it in very similar ways: What do you see when you come around this corner? What is in the foreground and the background? Setting up a long shot, a frame within a frame, you’re constructing space too, but film has a different language for it.”

To prepare for the project, Gang asked Bartoni for a list of her favorite films and watched them, as well as other classic films, with an eye toward how the cinematic space was constructed. At Studio Gang’s offices, architectural sketches for various views within the building are pinned to the wall alongside stills from films that relate to them. “Here’s one where we’re creating an opening, a place where you get layers of space, frames within frames,” Gang explains, pointing to a multiple-window view inspired by Kubrick. Gesturing toward a rendering of a ramp that runs the length of the building’s interior façade, she says, “As you’re moving up the ramp, you get this experience of the shadows from the glass being drawn across the space,” noting that it is inspired in part by the way Hitchcock used shadows and stairs to designate the passage of time in his films.

Gang particularly enjoys working on technically demanding projects, and has a reputation as a problem solver. So it’s no surprise that the Media Production Center breaks new ground not only in the way it serves its precise educational function, but in the way it’s built, period. Environmental sensitivity and sustainability were important to the college, which will apply for LEED certification for the project. They were important to the City of Chicago as well, which mandated, among other things, that the building have a partial “green roof,” or rooftop planted with vegetation to reduce energy consumption and the urban heat island effect. “We were able to do the green roof and satisfy our acoustical requirement simultaneously,” says Gang, explaining how her team developed ways the rooftop plantings could do double duty as sound buffers. “We were able to substitute some of the cost of an acoustical roof to bring it into cost with the green roof.”

Gang also applied a “green” solution to air handling. In most buildings, the air-conditioning equipment sits on the roof and cold air is dropped down into the building from the top. “That’s the way everyone does it,” she says. “The thing is, you’d be pushing that cold air through a hot layer of lights, and that’s not very efficient. So we, with our engineers, came up with a way to deliver the cool air down low, where the people are, and we’re able to significantly reduce the amount of energy used in the building. It seems like a no-brainer, but no one ever did it that way.”

Amid all the excitement about the building itself, Carter likes to circle back to its real significance for the college. “Other institutions have built buildings, of course, although I don’t think anyone has a building as dynamite as this one,” he says. It’s going to be beautiful. But remember, it’s also going to be a very functional building, and that’s the most important thing. Jeanne built it from the inside out, understanding the function, our educational needs, the use of space, getting all that clear before deciding what it should look like.”

That functionality will not only serve the current needs of multiple departments engaged in teaching media production. Faculty and administrators also believe it will significantly affect how media production is taught. “What we do now will influence how film is taught for the next century,” says Sheridan. “With this facility, from the day students walk in as freshmen, they will be exposed to the culture of filmmaking, and by the time they’re seniors, they will have worked at the shoulders of other people who preceded them—not like a trade-school apprenticeship, but through a mix of empirical knowledge, mentoring, and hands-on learning. We’re not here to teach people how to regurgitate ideas and push buttons on a keyboard. We’re here to help them create work that never existed before.”

“It’s a little like Wagner’s idea of the Gesamt-kunstwerk, the total artwork,” says Annette Barbier, chair of the Department of Interactive Arts and Media. “His operas were not just about the music, but about all the elements of the production: the set design, the costuming, the libretto. This building acknowledges that all these different parts are required to make a contribution to the central effort of creating some sort of media that communicates and inspires. Our students, across departments, will get to know one another, and learn from each other. I’m hoping this will help us break down some barriers. Convergence is upon us. As a college, we have to consider that. Everything we do is fundamentally about education.”

Bartoni concurs. “At the end of the day,” she says, “the building is the container. It’s the container in which our philosophy of education, to have students ‘author the culture of their times,’ can really take root.”

Ann Wiens is the editor of DEMO.
Mary Farmilant is a Chicago-based photographer who earned her M.F.A. from Columbia in 2005.