How to make an entrance

Beginning this fall, visitors approaching Chicago's Main Quadrangle from 58th Street and University Avenue will pass through a newly landscaped entryway framed by English oak trees and a yew hedge stretching from Albert Pick Hall on the south to Eckhart Hall on the north. The open lawn that two years ago replaced the tennis courts by Pick Hall will be bordered by planting beds, and flowering trees will line pedestrian entrances along the driveway.

Alistair McIntosh, a landscape architect with Sasaki Associates, designed the new entryway after receiving suggestions from University Architect Curt Heuring, University Planner Richard Bumstead, and several student and faculty groups representing the University community. "We talked with many people around the campus," says Bumstead. "There was a strong consensus in favor of the open space created by the removal of the tennis courts, [so] we looked at the entrance to the quad and decided to use plants as our architecture."

The design draws on the work of Beatrix Jones Farrand, an innovator in campus landscaping in the 1920s who framed many of the building entrances at Yale, Princeton, and Chicago with plants to make them inviting and easier to find.

The entranceway is part of a program to enhance the campus's status as a botanical garden, a designation awarded by the American Association of Botanic Gardens and Arboreta in 1997. Other landscaping on the Main Quadrangle includes planting bulbs in the spring, annuals in the summer, and chrysanthemums in the fall and hanging Tivoli lights on branches in the winter. Work on the new entryway began this summer and is expected to be completed by late October. -C.S.

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