The Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts is a new home to theatre, music, film, and visual arts, designed to support and encourage inter-disciplinary projects. The Logan Center also succeeds as a new, highly visible connection between UChicago’s campus and the cultural life of the South Side and greater Chicago.
The $114 million, 11-story, 184,000-square-foot building is an elegant arts hub in which artists and scholars across many disciplines work and perform. The building houses a 474 seat performance hall, 185 seat end stage studio theatre, a 100 seat flexible theatre, classrooms, studios, rehearsal rooms, and workshops. These innovative facilities support academic and co-curricular programs in visual arts, theatre and performance studies, music, art history, cinema and media studies, and creative writing. With spaces and programming attuned to the needs of the University and visitors alike, the Logan Center provides a vital new core for Chicago’s arts community.
In 2002, the University of Chicago tapped Schuler Shook to help develop the feasibility study for a proposed new center for the creative arts. Completed in 2004, the feasibility study was first used to support preliminary fundraising efforts. It then served as the key resource document for 26 architectural firms around the US that participated in the design competition for the building. In 2007, UChicago selected Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects for the project thanks to their unconventional design concept – a long, low, skylit building of studios and theatres coupled with an 11-story “tower of the arts” that together evoke the flat prairies of the Midwest and the great skyscrapers of Chicago.