Illinois Tech Partners with Corvias on 330-Bed Dormitory Project

CHICAGO—Corvias of East Greenwich, RI is partnering with the Illinois Institute of Technology to renovate Bailey Hall on its campus here that will, when completed, provide 330 beds for freshman and sophomores by the fall semester of 2020.

Corvias will be responsible for the development and management of the student housing project. Other partners include Dirk Denison Architects for the design and Gilbane Building Co. for the construction of the Bailey Hall renovation.

Bruce Watts, VP for facilities and public safety at Illinois Tech, says the renovation will provide “a new living experience for our first and second year students while revitalizing this historic and prominent part of our campus.”

Corvias founder and CEO John Picerne says of the project, “By engaging Dirk Denison as architect, we arrived at a solution that thinks of the students’ needs first, enveloped in preservation and celebration of the Mies design.” This partnership adds to the more than 30 public-private partnerships Corvias has in the United States.

The project includes interior renovations and exterior facade replacement of the historic Mies Van der Rohe-designed Bailey Hall. Originally built in 1955, the nine-story, 74,000 square-foot on-campus dormitory was decommissioned in 2007. The renovation project will incorporate 330 beds with residential common spaces on the ground floor and lower level. No development cost for the project was released.

The approach to Bailey Hall’s interior adapts the original floor plan to the needs of today’s students to foster student interactions. At ground level, residents will enter into a transparent lobby whose interior is kept spatially and materially the same as Mies’s original design. The redesign fully reconfigures the basement, taking advantage of unused space to insert an open staircase connecting the lobby with new gathering areas, shared resources, including recreation room, laundry and a collaboration space below.

Renovations will provide eight levels of accessible single and double rooms arranged in a “pod” style. Each floor is conceived as a social unit defined by large study and social areas. Rooms pinwheel around these communal nodes, linked by corridors that extend all the way to the facade, offering additional daylight with city and lake views. Working with extensive energy modeling, the project also updates the building’s mechanical systems and envelope, improving efficiency, thermal comfort, safety, and ease of maintenance. Denison described the new Bailey Hall as a “low-impact, healthy building.”

In April, The American Institute of Architects Committee on Architecture for Education selected the Illinois Institute of Technology’s newest campus building, the Ed Kaplan Family Institute for Innovation and Tech Entrepreneurship, as a recipient of an Education Facility Design Award, Merit Award. The Kaplan Institute is one of nine state-of-the-art education facilities from around the globe that was honored by the committee this year.

Designed by John Ronan, principal architect at John Ronan Architects and a professor at Illinois Tech’s College of Architecture, the Kaplan Institute was conceived both as a home for the Institute of Design and as a hub for innovation and collaboration between students of all academic disciplines. As such, the building is based around two open-air courtyards that lead to the entrances, designed to function as “collision nodes” to facilitate chance encounters between students.