B+L teamed with design architect, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, to design the David Rubenstein Forum at the University of Chicago. The forum is a space of discourse and intellectual exchange aimed at fostering the outward engagement of visiting scholars, researchers and dignitaries from around the world. The Forum’s prominent location on Chicago’s Midway Plaisance across from Rockefeller Chapel offers expansive views of Downtown Chicago and Lake Michigan as well as the University Campus and Woodlawn Community. The building is composed of a two-story base and a slender, eight-story tower that will provide the University with a 285-seat auditorium and much needed multipurpose meeting spaces for workshops, symposia and lectures, among other activities.

The tower is organized as a stack of neighborhoods with meeting and communal spaces offering diverse environments—formal and informal, calm and animated, focused and diffused, scheduled and spontaneous. Each neighborhood coalesces around a central private social lounge that offers a sense of community and identity. The neighborhoods are vertically stacked, rotated and oriented to their own unique perspective of Chicago, creating a panoramic, 360-degree form rather than a front or back face.