Chicago architect Carol Ross Barney has built a national reputation on local work–including the Cesar Chavez Multicultural Academic Center in the Back of the Yards neighborhood, the Little Village Family Resource Center, and the Jubilee Family Resource Center in North Lawndale. Often working within a tight budget on unpromising sites, she’s used form, color, and light in place of expensive materials to give her buildings visual depth and excitement. Her vocabulary includes contrasting strips of colored brick, bright yellow roofs, windows cut into the wall at odd angles, and sunny, colorful interiors. Her keen sense of balance keeps anything from appearing capricious or extraneous.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
“When I started,” Ross Barney says, “I felt a bit insecure because I had always worked in Chicago. I was born here, lived here, and I always felt quite able to interpret the city for the purposes of making a building, even when I was working in the Hispanic neighborhoods. This entire idea of learning the language from your community, having the symbols of your community…it was easy for me to see that.”
The employees housed in the Murrah building had been dispersed throughout the city for nearly nine years, and many didn’t want to return to the site where so many of their coworkers had perished. Ross Barney’s research team faced a delicate and complicated task. “We could ask how many pencil drawers you needed,” she says, “but we really wanted to know what they thought the building should be…. We did questionnaires: What do you think this building should symbolize? What do you think this building should represent? But people don’t think about buildings like that, so we had to do almost multiple choice: Do you think the building should be reverent? Progressive?”
Should the glass in fact shatter, extra measures have been taken to ensure that it stays in place. “To do that, you have to make sure that the frame is there to hold the glass, and so the frame . . . has become rather massive because of the resistance it has to provide,” Ross Barney continues. “Ours, we think, is very beautiful, because we worked on making it that way, by expressing the strength of the steel–not covering it–and exposing the galvanized finish.” Uniting the two ends of the horseshoe, a flat roof floats atop tall thin concrete columns in a modernist rethinking of the classical arcade.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Cynthia Howe.
