“Obviously, without its physical plant a university could not exist, but buildings reflect many things other than pure utility. A campus is a diary of the times reflecting the vigor of the University, the economic and social climate of the country, and the changing tastes and ideas of each era.”[1]
Charles S. Havens, University of Illinois Director of Physical Plant Planning and Construction, 1968
(research in progress)
During the COVID-19 epidemic, so many of us felt disconnected. We hunted for fulfilling ways to counter our detachment. Turning to social media or zoom, we connected with our friends and families, houses of worship, schools, workplaces and other outlets to feel a sense of belonging.
Some, like myself, looked to colleges for connection. Without a doubt, our relationship with our alma mater is one of the strongest in our lives, no matter how many years pass. Time is limited while you are a student on campus. Yet the memories associated with campus buildings and streetscapes remain entrenched forever. Alumni associations recognize this spirited and traditional relationship, hoping that alumni will give back or return to campus. When alumni visit campus buildings, particularly those associated with our own college days, those buildings reflect much more than their function. When those buildings disappear, so does a tangible link to our past.
As an alumna of the University of Illinois, I couldn’t believe how much I missed visiting Illinois Memorial Stadium or State Farm Center during the pandemic. I was not a student-athlete at the University, just a spectator. Yet, something drove me to become a member of numerous Illinois sports websites and follow Illini sports writers and bloggers on social media. This connection brought joy and a sense of belonging, recalling memories and connections as a student spectator in those stadiums, even if I lack sport-specific game knowledge.
As an architectural historian, I began to research the history of the recreational facilities at University of Illinois. Much has been written about the games, student-athletes, coaches, donors, and athletic directors. My interest lies in recreational history, associated building design, and the architects. I began researching Memorial Stadium, and as a part of my research, returned to a few football games as a 2021 season ticket holder to understand form and function.
AN ARCHITECTURAL HISTORY OF ILLINOIS MEMORIAL STADIUM: HOLABIRD AND ROCHE, ARCHITECTS
Constructed 1922-1923, horseshoe addition 1929
In the 1920s, the well-respected architectural firm of Holabird and Roche of Chicago designed several buildings on the University of Illinois campus, including the iconic Memorial Stadium. Holabird and Roche, later Holabird and Root, emerged in the 1880s as a pioneering architectural firm in Chicago, a city celebrated as America’s birthplace of Modern architecture. Known for their innovations in the Chicago School of Architecture, with early skyscrapers and steel-skeleton frames, Holabird and Roche embody the history of late 19th-century architectural innovation and the evolution of the large-scale firm in America. Martin Roche, FAIA (b. August 1, 1853, Cleveland, OH – d. June 6, 1927, Chicago, IL) and William Holabird, FAIA (b. September 1, 1854, New York – d. July 18, 1923, Chicago, IL) took advantage of architectural opportunities afforded by rebuilding a fire-ravaged city and Chicago’s subsequent booming economy. The firm was commissioned to design numerous public and commercial buildings in Chicago, as well as hotels and educational buildings, securing its standing as a leader in a dominant architectural city. The firm’s success continued through the late 19th- and early 20th-centuries, maturing under the firm’s founding partners. When Chicago’s World Columbian Exposition of 1893 nationally influenced an era of classical design and plan traditions, Holabird and Roche helped usher in classical influences, using historic motifs and forms for design inspiration. Larger and more successful architecture firms of this era, like Holabird, often had their own in-house libraries from which firm designers could research and find design inspiration based on historic models and precedents. As historic revival style architecture rose in popularity in early 20th-century American design, military tours and training in Europe combined with access to books and periodicals proved to be a valuable advantage for certain firms.
The booming 1920s, when Illinois Memorial Stadium was commissioned, brought a generational change to Holabird and Roche. Following William Holabird’s death in 1923, his son John, took on a solid role with the firm. Trained at West Point and the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris, John A. Holabird, Sr., FAIA (b. May 4, 1886, Evanston, IL – d. May 1, 1945) actively led the firm through significant projects beginning with his partnership in 1919 through the mid-1940s. When founder Martin Roche died in 1927, the old partnership was terminated and the firm became known as Holabird and Root. John W. Root, Jr. (b. July 14, 1887, Chicago, IL – d. October 24, 1963, Falmouth, MA), was a draftsman friend of John Holabird who joined the firm in 1914, became a partner in 1919, and then co-piloted the new partnership in 1928. Root was trained in architecture at Cornell University and the Ecole des Beaux Arts, and the son of a famous Chicago architect. Both John Holabird and John Root served overseas in World War I.[2]
The firm, in order to remain competitive, had to grow, adapt, and diversify to gain new business. During the first decades of the 20th century, Holabird and Roche/Holabird and Root developed new specialties in university, hotel, telecommunications, retail, and health care design.[3] The firm continued to take commissions outside of Chicago, including a number of projects in downstate Illinois. In Urbana, Holabird and Roche designed the Tudor Revival-style Wesley Foundation Social Center Building at 1203 W. Green Street (1917-21), University of Illinois – Educational Building/University High School (1916-20), the Horticulture Field Laboratory, and Memorial Stadium.[4] The firm continued its tradition of architectural innovations into the early 20th-century, and thoughtfully separated its architecture and engineering departments for an added advantage. The firm even made a surprising departure into recreational design, including clubhouse and stadium projects.
Recreational projects became a small specialty of Holabird and Roche. After successful commissions for the Glen View Club, In 1921, Holabird and Roche entered a design competition for a new municipal stadium in Chicago, forging a new firm specialty. Although stadiums have been around since the ancient times, the growing popularity of spectator sports in the United States in the 20th-century brought demand for stadiums. To fit specifications for sports such as football and baseball, architects explored the use of concrete and steel.
As the winners of the design competition for Chicago’s Grant Park Stadium, now Soldier Field (1922-1926), Holabird and Roche created a U-shaped, cast stone colonnaded multipurpose structure along Lake Michigan. Budgetary cutbacks limited the grand ornamental features of the initial design proposed for Chicago’s South Park Commission. Yet Soldier Field, like other monuments of its era, successfully honors those in the armed forces lost in World War I. The stadium’s design complements the Classical Revival architecture of the nearby Field Museum of Natural History. Major alterations to Soldier Field have diminished the original design intent. First, when the stadium’s northward axis to the Field Museum was broken with the construction of the Chicago Park District Administration Building in 1939, followed by the 2003 introduction of a massive interior structural steel and precast concrete stadium bowl. The bowl containing tiered seating, club levels, and luxury suites towers above the historic colonnades. The $606 million dollar project designed by architects Ben Wood and Carlos Zapata, was controversial but did include a restoration of the stadiums 64 historic Doric columns.
STADIUM DESIGN
Illinois Memorial Stadium is one of a number of massive college football stadiums of its era. Twenty five years earlier, the University of Pennyslvania built Franklin Field in Philadelphia, the first college football stadium in the United States. Franklin Field, a one-tiered stadium, was small compared with those stadiums that followed. In the 1920s, college athletic departments built stadiums to serve as large spaces of consumer spectacle, while also creating a visible shrine to those lost in World War I. Under George Huff, University of Illinois athletic director from 1901-1936,[5] the University of Illinois built a new football stadium rivaling any of its time. Illinois Memorial Stadium is only one of two major double-decked football stadiums constructed in the 1920s.
A stadium is a form following function, whose architects purposefully arranged elements to accommodate the sport and its spectators. Holabird and Roche designed a horseshoe stadium for the University of Illinois in 1921, similar to their design for Soldier Field in Chicago. Traditional stadium design consists of a tiered seating bowl, a floor or playing field, portals, and passages. Sports management and athletic departments drive the design of today’s stadiums whose income generating and recruitment needs are reflected in newer modern spaces.
Memorial Stadium’s exterior architectural expression reflects its purposeful respect for those who died in World War I. The façade is ordered, with austere restraint fitting for a memorial. Brick walls punctuated with stone panels and multiple entrances below, and a monumentally strong, stone colonnade above. By raising the memorial to the top of the structure, it heightens the honor bestowed to the university’s lost alumni soldiers. Its paired classical (Doric) columns refine and give order the austere exterior of the stadium.
Holabird and Roche’s design for Memorial Stadium followed precedent set by other University of Illinois campus buildings. The design called for a red brick exterior accented by limestone banding and panels as seen in the University’s Georgian Revival style. Additionally, pedimented, ornamental stone surrounds at the ends of the colonnade also reflect the Georgian Revival style.
The architects placed emphasis on spectator circulation when designing Memorial Stadium. Four, anchoring corner towers, two on each of the east and west sides of the stadium delineate the ramps that orchestrate movement through the stadium seating. According John Holabird, Jr., his father modeled the ramps after the original Bramante Staircase at the Vatican in Rome, built in 1505. The Bramante staircase has a square tower with a spiral paved ramp in a double helix shape. The shape allowed traffic to travel up one ramp and down the other.
Like Soldier Field in Chicago, budgetary cutbacks limited the grand ornamental features of the initial design proposed for University of Illinois Memorial Stadium. Nevertheless, what remains is a stately, proportional, and rhythmic design. Architect Jack Hartray, in a 1992 retrospective book on the dynasty firm, mentions that Holabird and Roche/Holabird and Root designs in the early decades of the 20th century offered a “perfect balance of structural audacity, elegant proportion, and sophisticated ornament.”[6] Exterior walls of the stadium graciously articulate spaces behind. Reaching above the original exterior walls is the well done modern addition to a historic stadium. Its glass walls articulate the newer spaces above, holding today’s necessary income generating spaces such as club levels and event rooms, and a communication center for media who broadcast and publish digitally on gameday.
Former Illini football great Harold “Red” Grange, on his return to Memorial Stadium on October 18, 1974, shared his deep connection with Illinois Memorial Stadium. “I’ve always said that this is the most beautiful stadium in the world and the Illinois fans are the most beautiful people in the world.” If anyone had a connection to Memorial Stadium it was Red Grange. Grange’s coach with the Chicago Bears, George Halas, said “Red Grange had more impact on the game of football than any single individual in this century.”
In 2006, University of Illinois Memorial Stadium was determined eligible for the National Register of Historic Places.
And so do we go back into the dim ages that tomorrow a white magnificence a Stadium may tell the world that we of Illinois have fought and died for our country and fought and lived for our fellow men.There will be a court of honor for every hero who died in the war and a great recreation field to bring greater vigor and life to our young men and women. And there will be a vast enclosure where seventy-five thousand may see twenty-two men in the heat of sportsmanlike conflict or, as the May sun sets, many maids in harmonious and rhythmic welcome to the springtime.
–from The Story of the Stadium by University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Athletic Association, 1921.
[1] Weller, Allen Stuart, 1907-, and University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign campus). Committee on the Centennial. 100 Years of Campus Architecture At the University of Illinois. [Urbana]: Published for the Committee on the Centennial of the University of Illinois by the University of Illinois Press, 1968, p. before page 1.
[2] Marquis, Albert Nelson, editor. Who’s Who in Chicago: The Book of Chicagoans, 1926. ChIcago: A. N. Marquis & Company, 1926, pp. 424, 747.
[3] Blazer, Werner. Chicago Architecture: Holabird & Root, 1880-1992. 1992: Birkhauser Verlag Basel. Berlin, p. 49.
[4] Holabird and Root also designed the Foreign Languages Building (1968-1971) on the University of Illinois –Urbana Champaign campus.
[5] Pearson, Mike. Illini Legends, Lists & Lore. Champaign, IL: Sports Publishing L.L.C., 2002, p.3.
[6] Blazer, Werner. Chicago Architecture: Holabird & Root, 1880-1992. 1992: Birkhauser Verlag Basel. Berlin, p. 12-13.
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