Josh

University Hall

Chicago, IL

The University of Illinois at Chicago's high-rise, known informally as UH, combines two terrible traits in a building: first, it's unspeakably ugly, and second, it's over-designed. The whole thing is made of unadorned concrete, and it's all straight lines and sharp angles, without even the slightest curve to be found. It's also designed to get wider and wider as it goes up, which makes it look awkward and unbalanced, like it's about to fall over at any time. Because, apparently, of its unusual shape, it creates a wind-tunnel effect. Any time there's a bit of wind around the UIC campus, it starts swirling around UH, getting so strong that it often becomes hard to walk into it. It doesn't just get that bad in major storms, mind you, but quite often.

It's ridiculous on the inside, too. The great thing about UH SHOULD be the view. UIC is located on Chicago's Near West Side, and it should have spectacular views of the downtown skyline, Lake Michigan, etc. And it does - sort of. Kind of. This is where the over-designed nature of UH really shines through. You see, the windows inside are all in the shape of the letter I for Illinois. So they're just narrow little slits you can barely see through, plus slightly wider trapezoid-shaped windows on the top and bottom of each. You can see a bit better out of these windows - if you get down on your hands and knees to look through the bottom one or climb up on a chair to see out the top. Otherwise, your field of vision is limited to a few inches, so you're squinting to see more than just the barest slice of the spectacular view that should be clear from the upper floors.

I got my Master's degree at UIC, and I graduated more than four years ago now, but I still think of UH and how ridiculous and how horrible and how stupidly designed it is. As I'm someone who knows nothing about architecture, that's quite a feat of design.