photo/Lisa Ventre

The University of Cincinnati's new Campus Recreation Center is receiving rave reviews from national architecture critics, including the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times.

The 350,000-square-foot facility, the final piece of UC's dynamic MainStreet initiative, will open its fitness functions Monday, Feb. 6. The building, created by Pritzker Prize winner Thom Mayne, also includes space for housing, dining, classrooms, a convenience store and more.

Here is a sample of what the critics are saying:

Jan. 29, 2006

-- "Every once in a while a building comes along that fulfills your faith that architecture can be a noble profession, not just a parade of street-walking 'starchitects' who strut their signature styles around the globe. The new Student Recreation Center at the University of Cincinnati, by Thom Mayne, last year's winner of the Pritzker Architecture Prize, richly deserves such praise."

-- "A former utilitarian road through the hilly campus has become a winding, picturesque brick street, which the university calls 'Main Street,' free from cars. It all suggests an Italian hill town, a sort of San Gimignano on the Ohio River. The spectacular revamp is one of the most significant acts of campus planning since Thomas Jefferson laid out his 'academical village' at the University of Virginia."

Blair Kamin, the Chicago Tribune's architecture critic

Jan. 31, 2006

-- "Inside, its spaces are crisscrossed with massive trusses and other structural elements and bathed in light from three dozen circular skylights of varying sizes. Every level of the interior seems to offer views of dramatic spaces above and below. From the food court, you catch glimpses of the football field. From the juice bar you see the climbing wall."

-- "The building is the last architectural puzzle piece in an ambitious plan, overseen by the landscape designer George Hargreaves, to remake the western half of the Cincinnati campus and to help shake its reputation as a commuter school."

-- "Together with existing buildings by Frank Gehry, Michael Graves, Peter Eisenman and others, Main Street gives the university one of the most impressive collections of contemporary architecture on any American campus."

-- "But the star of the building -- the place where its sometimes tortured structural logic comes into dazzling focus -- is the 36,000-square-foot gym, with a four-lane running track suspended from the huge trusses that cross its 65-foot-high ceiling. This is a space that combines the imposing structural heft of a large 19th century room -- a train station arrival hall, say -- with the transparency of a modernist building, the cut-through, sectional views of a Rem Koolhaas design and some Piranesian intrigue. Especially as viewed from the running track, it is amongst the most dramatically impressive interior spaces produced by any firm in the last decade. Architecture students will be studying images of it 30 years from now."

Christopher Hawthorne, Times staff writer

 

LINK:

View the Flash photo tour of the new Campus Recreation Center