The remarkable story of the University of Chicago's Accelerator Building

 

I always loved the clean concrete elegance of Hausner & Macsai’s High Energy Physics Building at the University of Chicago, but I never took pictures of its massive, more anonymous neighbor

Now, as both structures are about to be ground into dust, I’ve finally learned what an absolutely amazing story Schmidt, Garden & Erikson’s 1949 Accelerator Building held inside.

Enrico Fermi and crew may have created the “first controlled generation of nuclear power” across the street, memorialized by a Henry Moore sculpture, but Fermi actually spent a lot more time in the Accelerator, custom-built for him, to house what was at the time the most powerful atom smasher in the world.

The Accelerator Building’s spectacle was all internal: a massive four-story open space with a 100-ton crane to do the heavy lifting. Here anything could happen, from smashing atoms, to building telescopes, to housing 20 tons of dinosaur fossils or a swimming pool for crocodiles.

Walking by, who would imagine what wonders were to be found within those abject facades so staid they almost made the huge thing seem invisible. Now, the kind of bunkered concrete and stone that was the fashion of the post-war-paranoia time is considered almost antiquity when it comes to styling.

Their replacement, the new $170,00,000 Science and Engineering Building by HDR and Allison Grace Williams, reflects the fashion of our own day, two huge intersecting blocks, a festival of glass in standard office-building-meets-lab-podium aesthetic.

Best Photos of 2024

Best photos of 2024?

Who knows?  After you take almost 50,000 pictures in a year, they all sort of blur together, and not just because most of them aren’t in focus. 

But everybody else is posting their "best-of's" so I ask you guvnor: why not me?  I put it to you - and I leave it to you.

The good part is that while I may, through some perverse compulsion, post them, you, dear reader, are under no obligation to look at them, which would put you in good company with, at the very least, 99.999% of humanity.

But should you choose to persist, I've winnowed the 50k down to an arbitrary handful, and hope that you’ll be amused by this sampling of life in Chicago over the past 12 months. 

(Probably the best way to view is to click on the first, then click again to move through the images.)

Cheri Charlton

Carlos Kalmar

Fireman at smoky blaze at Smith & Wollinsky's

 

Chicago Symphony Orchestra Music Director Designate Klaus Mäkelä

Paul Anka

Heather Cherone at work

Street preacher reminding us we're all going to Hell