The Gordon Parks Arts Hall serves middle and high school visual and performing arts programs.

High quality, well functioning architecture can improve the way we live, work, learn, and play on a daily basis. In 2009, I began working on a master plan for the Laboratory Schools Campus for the University of Chicago. Lab is an N-12 private school ranked in the top five schools in the country. The master plan would include 300,000 SF of restoration and adaptive re-use, and two new buildings—a 130,000 SF early childhood center and an 80,000 SF new arts and media building, known as Gordon Parks Arts Hall. Here was an opportunity to demonstrate what good design can achieve.  

Architecture itself is a form of communication and a vessel for creativity. In a learning atmosphere, a well designed space can mean the difference between success and failure. Filmmaker George Lucas and his wife Mellody Hobson, CEO of Ariel Investments shared my belief in the power of architecture as a form of communication and made a substantial contribution to the project. 

The process began with a three hour meeting with Lucas and Hobson, Bob Zimmer (President of the University of Chicago), David Greene (Senior Vice President for Strategic Planning), David Magill (Director of Lab Schools), and myself (Joe Valerio). We reviewed the design of the building and discussed the importance of various communication methods.

George Lucas himself gave a fascinating, lengthy monologue about the significance of multimedia literacy, the idea that one should know how to convey ideas through different mediums, whether it be film, text, architecture, music, math, or anything in between. He continued to discuss the importance of moving ideas across space and time, pointing out that different mediums of communication have different strengths and weaknesses. He even argued that the name of the language arts department should be changed because, “It is no longer about language. It is all about communication using every possible media available. Communication has evolved over our lifetimes from being dominated by text with still images, to the now ever present PowerPoint. But in a multi-media literate world you will communicate using video, music, photographs, animation and yes, even text.” The more mediums we are conversational in, the better we will be able to communicate. 

“I think you should change the name of the Language Arts Department. It is no longer about language. It is all about communication using every possible media available. Communication has evolved over our lifetimes from being dominated by text with still images, to the now ever present PowerPoint. But in a multi-media literate world you will communicate using video, music, photographs, animation and yes, even text. It is all about communicating, moving ideas across space and time.”

-George Lucas, 2009

Lucas went on to explain that, “all media can be interpreted based on two measures, the intellectual and the emotional.” A medium like math is precise, articulate and intellectual, where a medium like music is highly emotional. Architecture is at the intersection of these two, combining highly technical information with beauty and aesthetics that evoke emotion. This idea can be illustrated in a circular graph, where one moves from the extremes of emotion (music) and intellect (math) at the top of the graph, to the intersection of the two (architecture) at the bottom, passing through various combinations of both. 

After our meeting, I had the opportunity to review my notes with George Lucas. We had a fascinating conversation discussing the similarities between architecture and film. The two share so many similarities as mediums of communication. Both processes take years to complete, involving hundreds of people with hundreds of opportunities for something to go wrong before completion. The two also, however, have fundamental differences in the way when it comes to viewer experience. With film, the viewer is stationary as the images move, in architecture the viewer moves while the image is stationary. I shared this sentiment with George Lucas and he agreed, but had an eyeopening note to add; Filmmakers create “waking dreams,” or fictitious scenarios that only exist in film, whereas architecture builds real dreams, there is no faking a built structure. Yet each medium has the ability to transport a user into a new state, whether it be physical or mental.

May the 4th be with you.

Author: