Kennedy-King College

Revitalization Goal
Drives Campus Design

by Paula Widholm

Come next fall a new anchor at 63rd Street and Halsted Avenue in Englewood on Chicago's South Side will bring sights of students strolling across a landscaped quadrangle between classes at the $254 million Kennedy-King College.

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Providing a great education was just one of the design goals of the project.

The other was to bring safety and stability to the streets of Englewood, which have historically been lined with abandoned storefronts and corner liquor stores.

The project began in August 2005 and will involve an entire new campus. As of mid-January, the project has been averaging 340 people onsite per day as they're wrapping up the masonry and drywall. The project is slated to be finished by June.

The city's Public Building Commission awarded the project to McClier Corp., now known as Austin AECOM. Originally, the project was estimated at $225 million, but the PBC says rising construction and materials costs, as well as splitting the project into smaller parts to attract more minority bidders, drove the price to $254 million. Construction costs alone, not including architectural and engineering fees, total $202 million.

The existing Kennedy-King building will be demolished. It had fallen into disrepair and the cost to renovate it would have been too high, according to Chris Lee, president of Chicago-based Johnson & Lee Architects/Planners and Kennedy-King project principal.

"City colleges are normally one large building," Lee says. "We thought it would be nice to create a campus with a number of buildings to bring a collegiate image to the community of Englewood."

At the 40-acre site, classrooms are included in each of the six buildings, which range from 18,000 to 140,000 sq ft. Altogether, Kennedy-King will be 500,000 sq ft.

"You'll see a lot of the students going from building to building," Lee says. "To make it a safer community, you need to get people out on the street."

Another way to get more college students walking around at 63rd and Halsted was to create the entrance and exit to the Chicago Transit Authority at street level, rather than connecting the platform directly to the campus.

"Since the Green Line ran through the site, our first thought was to make a connection to it at the platform level, but we decided to have riders exit onto Halsted Street," Lee says.

Spurring Other Development

More foot traffic on Halsted may also spur retail development.

A restaurant run by the college's culinary program will be on the northeast corner of 63rd and Halsted. This building will also include the theater department, the television station WYCC and the campus radio station WKCC.

On the southeast corner will be an applied sciences building for training in fields like auto mechanics or HVAC. This building will also include a reprographics store and bookstore. Other campus buildings include an academic building, library, athletic and student services building and a day-care center. A ball field, day-care playground and 80-car parking lot are also onsite.

Open from 7 a.m. to midnight, the day care allows "single moms to attend classes, go to work and come back and pick up their kids," Lee says.

The campus features all the signs of higher education-a clock tower in the quad and red brick with glass curtain wall buildings flooded with natural light that include several two- and three-story expanses.

"Chicago is a brick town," Lee says. "We also didn't want to go with precast because we wanted to make more opportunity for craftsmen that live in Englewood."

As hoped for, commercial and residential developers are taking note of this newcomer at Englewood's arterial crossroads.

"With the construction of the campus there has been a renewed interest in the Englewood community for development of housing and retail," Lee says. "It's a perfect example of public-sector work bringing private-sector development into Englewood."

New developments near the campus include a library, senior citizen center, police station, fire station, Korean retail shop, Walgreens, Aldi's, McDonald's, Chicago Department of Housing residences, as well as residential building from private developers.

The design team includes a majority stake from Johnson & Lee Architects and participation from VOA Associates, both based in Chicago. Nearly 60% of the design team is minorities.

High construction bids and difficulties in agreeing on minority and community participation in the project stalled the Kennedy-King College project for six years.

Hiring Minorities

A major project goal was hiring minorities and local residents to build the campus. August Mitchell, construction project manager for Chicago-based Austin AECOM, says that of the labor workforce onsite, 42% are African-American and 15% are Hispanic.

"Part of the goal was to help smaller minority contractors build capacity," Mitchell says.

To do this, bid packages were broken out by building plus sitework. As a result, the project employed 95 subcontractors, including many small minority firms. There are four electrical, three plumbing, three drywall, three painting and four masonry contractors.

"We tried to have one minority contractor in every trade," Mitchell says.

Simply getting bids proved to be another challenge. "This project had been bid several times, and it took effort to get people excited about it again," Mitchell says.

To find the small minority contractors, Mitchell says he spread the word through community groups, minority organizations and community newspapers.

Other challenges to the project included "working with a lot of smaller minority contractors that haven't done projects of this size on a fast-track basis, and working on multiple buildings all at the same time on a 40-acre site."

The project's local hiring initiatives helped bring local residents into union-paying trade-worker jobs.

"We had a lot of restrictions from the unions," Mitchell says. "Some won't allow apprentices to come in. However, with some of the trades, like cement, laborers, and brick layers, we were able to get some involvement."

An old Sears and a movie theater were demolished at the site and there was a "substantial amount of utility relocations," Mitchell says. "It's a central mechanical system and exterior piping is fed to the other five buildings from a central plant all underground. All new electrical services were put in underground duct banks."

SIDEBAR

A Neighborhood Project

The Kennedy-King project on Chicago's South Side has exceeded minority hiring goals.

Participation:	Goal	Actual
MBE	24%	41%
WBE	4%	5%
City Resident	50%	56%
Local Hire	15%	15%
Source: Austin AECOM

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