AA school full of lessons about architecture: In animpoverished urban neighborhood, John Ronan's Christ the King does a lot with a little
The new building, called Christ the King Jesuit College Preparatory School and located at 5088 W. Jackson Blvd. (above), is touted as the first all-new Catholic high school on the West Side in more than 80 years. It may look too corporate, but its business-like image and its unrepentant sense of newness —a shock amid the tattered brick buildings around it — are both there by design, sending a message that the building marks a fresh start.
The architecture provides order amid urban chaos, as does an innovative work-study program that places students in clerical and entry-level jobs at law firms, banks, hospitals and other businesses. Both form a framework that is helping students like Larry Carr and Khadijah White to build a better life. Here is a reminder, after years in which designers were obsessed with flashy museums and concert halls, that the social promise of architecture still matters.
“I kind of envision it as a school of the future, not any old office building,” said Carr, a neatly dressed sophomore wearing a tie. “It’s a profession environment,” White added.
They are among 160 freshmen and sophomores at the new building, which opened in January and will gradually ramp up to its full capacity of 600 students. More than 80 percent of the students come from Austin, where boarded-up houses betray a recent wave of home foreclosures. Nearly all are African-American. Yet surprisingly, more than 90 percent are not Catholic, revealing how attractive a quality, values-based education is to the area’s struggling families.
Accordingly, at Christ the King, Ronan made every move count, beginning with an L-shaped plan that consists of a thin, steel-framed academic wing that runs east-west along Jackson and a load-bearing, masonry-walled athletics wing, that runs north-south on South Leamington Avenue. The simple structure allowed the building to be erected quickly, a key move because the students were stuck in an old Catholic grammar school with overcrowded classrooms, where they used plastic tubs to store their stuff instead of lockers.
Ronan animates his austere shapes with an outer layer of randomly arranged cement panels in dignified shades of blue and gray. This “rain screen” façade, which keeps out the rain while an inner layer provides thermal insulation, endows the boxy exterior with flashes of colors and a subtle sense of depth. In the most inventive exterior touch, reverse-image photographs of the Stations of the Cross are printed on cement panels that ring the courtyard (above). The pictures lend the outdoor space a sacred identity, though I wonder how they will bear up to Chicago’s brutal climate.
Ronan was able to let loose in one place: a stirring first-floor chapel, lined with glass-block walls and dramatized by a rectangular skylight that rises to the building’s roof (above). The chapel epitomizes elegant simplicity, with a stainless-steel Holy Water font, a maple altar and a cross formed of thin stainless-steel cable. Here, Ronan transforms the utilitarian aesthetic found elsewhere in the school to a higher, spiritual level.
Christ the King is not the architectural equal of Ronan’s more striking Comer Youth Center, but it is a model exercise in making much out of little — and powerful evidence that architecture can have a profound impact, especially where you least expect to find it.
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