The University of Illinois at Chicago plans to build a $115 million computer science center due to the rising demand for the most popular major in its College of Engineering. Construction on the new Computer Design Research & Learning Center is scheduled to start in the spring. This will double the capacity for the university 's growing computer science department. (Rendering above courtesy of University of Illinois at Chicago).
Crain's Chicago Business states that the project was approved by the University of Illinois board of trustees in March and is expected to be completed by 2023.
The new building will provide the following:
- 135,000 square feet of classrooms
- Lab space
- Study space
- Conference space
Even though the University of Illinois System, which is comprised of campuses in Chicago, Champaign-Urbana and Springfield, has faced additional costs and financial strain due to the pandemic, it has still reported record student enrollment for this fall, including at the Chicago campus.
Three years ago, computer science became the most popular major within UIC's College of Engineering. Enrollment rose 10 percent this year to 1,885 computer science students, including undergraduate and graduate students, and the headcount is expected to grow 40 percent by the year 2025 according to Peter Nelson, Dean of UIC's College of Engineering.
"The true bottleneck is that we don't have any place to put faculty members. The department's 58 full-time and five part-time faculty members are spread across four buildings, and some use the library as an office."
Dean of UIC's College of Engineering | Peter Nelson
The new building on Taylor Street is expected to fill out a collection of six engineering buildings. Before the college's new innovation building was finished last year, UIC had not had a new addition in 30 years.
Stephen Van Dyck, partner at Seattle based LMN Architects designed the building along with Chicago based Booth Hansen.
"The commitment on the university's part has really been unflinching. The curving geometry is completely new to the campus. It will have lots of windows and a winter garden, completely different than the current "cold, crisp, angular buildings."
Partner at LMN Architects | Stephen Van Dyck
An article in UIC College of Engineering reports that the computer science center will become a prominent fixture along what is becoming the engineering corridor on West Taylor Street, allowing us to accommodate our continued enrollment growth in computer science and to provide the most advanced learning, teaching and research spaces for our students and faculty.
Per UIC Today, the Computer Design Research Learning Center will include a 1,200 square foot robotics lab and 1,600 square feet of classroom space. It also will be the new home for UIC's Electronic Visualization Laboratory, an internationally renowned interdisciplinary research lab.
The computer science department has approximately $45 million in active research grants, with national CSRankings in the following:
- Web and information retrieval (7)
- Economics and computation (12)
- Artificial intelligence (17)
- Logic and verification (17)
- Machine learning and data mining (21
- Natural language processing (21
The building will also serve as an important space for our computer science department which has seen skyrocketing enrollments, has six specialties ranked in the top 25 nationally and is leading the nation in recruiting world-class faculty members.
