OMA and JACOBS unveil design for Discovery Partners Institute Headquarters

Project description by OMA

The 78 is a planned mega-development to transform 62-acres into a new innovation district along the Chicago River. Located on a one-acre site within The 78, the new headquarters of the Discovery Partners Institute (DPI), a part of The University of Illinois System, will anchor the district. As the first project to break ground at The 78, the building will signal the beginning of a transformation—one that will connect South Loop and Chinatown, filling the 62-acre void that has long separated them.

At this significant moment, the new DPI headquarters reflects the ambition to make new links to existing areas and communities surrounding it. Its multi-directional form is impartial to any one specific direction, maximizing the potential to create strong connections to neighborhoods on all “sides” of the building, adjacent riverfront, and future phases of the innovation district at The 78.

The base of the building reinforces an openness to the city by populating the ground-floor with spaces shared with the public. A café, auditorium, exhibition space and multipurpose rooms offer opportunities for indoor-outdoor activities, extending DPI’s reach to the public realm and landscape.

The building’s main entry is located at 15th Street and Wells-Wentworth, with additional entries placed east-west through the building to create porosity across the site. The open and accessible ground plane will expand the domain of activities to welcome the public and a Richard Hunt sculpture will anchor the site landscape.
 
On the upper levels, the traditional spaces for work and education are diversified to provide both formal and informal, prescribed and ad-hoc environments for meeting, learning and collaboration. The building’s key programs–classrooms, offices, experimental and computational labs–are stacked together for greatest efficiency and useability and organized into ‘towers’. The towers define horizontal floorplans of mixed program configurations to encourage interaction across the building’s varied and multi-disciplinary users.

The building will drive innovation and orthogonal collaboration, drawing from a variety of and seemingly unrelated perspectives to foster new insights. An atrium with flexible circulation and collaborative spaces at the heart of the building will become an active collision zone. Within the atrium, carefully coordinated stairs and meeting rooms forge loosely but intentionally defined paths and destinations to draw in and encourage users to navigate areas outside of their disciplines.

The interior programs are enclosed in a high-performance, high-visibility façade, exposing the energy of DPI’s new headquarters without compromising comfort. Solid, horizontal metal panels provide integrated solar shading for optimal interior conditions. With optimized transparency, the building will maintain views to and from surrounding neighborhoods, the Chicago River, and the Loop skyline, becoming a beacon and invitation.