University Apartments
- Architects
- I. M. Pei Araldo Cossutta
- Year
- 1961
- Style
- International Style
- City
- Chicago, IL
The University Apartments are twin ten-story towers built in 1961, designed by I. M. Pei with Araldo Cossutta, as part of a city initiative to revitalize the residential stock of Hyde Park just north of the University of Chicago. The project responded to decades of decline in the neighborhood following its heyday around the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the towers are known locally by less flattering nicknames that speak to their stark modern profile.
the building
Twin towers. The complex is built as two separate ten-story residential towers rather than a single block, the kind of large-scale massing typical of postwar urban renewal housing.
the style
The towers are an International Style example, part of the wave of unadorned, structurally expressed modernist housing that firms like Pei's built across American cities during postwar urban renewal. In Hyde Park, that stripped-down concrete vocabulary reads as a sharp break from the neighborhood's older housing stock, which is likely why residents nicknamed the towers 'Monoxide Island' and 'the toasters of Hyde Park.'
More on International Stylesignificance
The University Apartments, also known as the University Park Condominiums, are listed on the National Register of Historic Places as part of the mid-century transformation of Hyde Park's residential fabric.
nearby
- St. Thomas Church and Convent
- Robert A. Millikan House
- Hyde Park Union Church
- Arthur H. Compton House
- Keck-Gottschalk-Keck Apartments
- Frank R. Lillie House