Skip to main content
Add as a preferred source on Google

City Colleges of Chicago: Malcolm X College and School of Health Sciences

  • 06/01/18
City Colleges of Chicago

PHOTO © JASON KEEN

The new Malcolm X College and School of Health Sciences, located in Chicago’s Medical District, provides 545,000 square feet of state-of-the-art learning and support spaces for hands-on training of allied health professionals. The campus is comprised of a series of interconnected buildings designed to interact with the surrounding neighborhood. The facility design leverages transparency to provides a variety of touch-down spaces for idea sharing, collaboration, group study, and model academic behavior.

The classrooms, teaching labs, recreation facilities, conference center, and support spaces are all organized around a student union, library, and roof garden. The facility is crowned by an eight-story tower, which represents a virtual hospital and includes classrooms, skill, and high-fidelity simulation labs; all spaces are designed with advanced technology and equipment to emulate modern healthcare facilities. The simulation spaces support multi-step scenarios that prepare learners for real-life events.

The college-to-careers educational model links highly specialized curriculums with the needs of local employers to create a direct bridge between students and jobs in fields such as nursing, radiology, paramedics, pharmacy, dentistry, and more. The facility also operates a dental clinic to outreach to the community.

Moody Nolan served as architect-of-record for the building and 1,200-car parking structure. HERA laboratory planners provided medical and simulation equipment and AV/Data capture programming, planning, and implementation for 67 allied health spaces housing 125 different simulation event spaces. Additionally, HERA provided full design and equipment planning services for the core laboratory spaces.

The building is surrounded by a high-performance envelope to reduce its carbon footprint. An intensive green roof and patio space, which utilizes solar reflecting permeable pavers, reduces the overall heating and cooling load of the building. A water reclamation irrigation system harvests and stores rain water for watering site plantings while also mitigating storm water run-off. The project has achieved LEED Gold certification.

This article originally appeared in the College Planning & Management June 2018 issue of Spaces4Learning.

Featured

  • Architectural Power for the Modern Campus Landscape

    For generations, an outdoor classroom only required a textbook and a patch of grass. Today, not only has the laptop replaced the printed pages, the rise of agile learning has turned campuses into study halls with students listening to lectures and researching topics from quads, gardens, and plazas. The challenge for architects and facility managers is to provide connectivity without cluttering the landscape with visual eyesores or creating safety hazards with extension cords.

  • Colorado School District Breaks Ground on Unified PK–12 Campus

    The Haxtun School District No. Re-2J in Haxtun, Colo., recently announced that ground has been broken on a renovation/addition project that will unite its two schools, Haxtun Elementary and Haxtun Jr/Sr High School, according to a news release.

  • Q&A: How to Prevent Kitchen Grease Fires in Commercial Kitchens

    School cafeterias and university dining halls serve thousands of meals daily, relying on high-heat equipment like fryers, grills, and ovens. While these operations keep students fed, they also generate significant grease-laden vapors. Without proper controls, this grease becomes a silent fire threat. As a certified exhaust cleaning specialist and business coach who has helped hundreds of institutional facilities achieve NFPA 96 compliance, I emphasize that proactive grease management isn’t optional; it’s a core fire/life safety practice.

  • Montclair State University Starts Construction on $120M STEM Building

    Montclair State University in Montclair, N.J., recently broke ground on a new $120-million Interdisciplinary Science Building, according to university news. The university partnered with HoK Architects for the project’s design, and it’s scheduled to open in time for the 2028–29 academic year.