Champaign-Urbana Neighborhood Stories

"Champaign-Urbana saw rapid suburban growth in the decades after World War II. Veterans started new families, and the university swiftly expanded, bringing more students, staff, and faculty to campus. At the same time, Urbana lost dozens of blocks of homes and apartments as new facilities for engineering and the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts grew east toward Lincoln Avenue. Federal programs incentivized developers to plat new neighborhoods, often on agricultural land at the edge of urban development. Town-gown alliances of financers and landowners sparked dozens of new subdivisions in C-U, primarily to the south of campus. As you can see from the scattering of houses designed by Williams, Baker, Replinger, and others across the south side of CU, most architect-designed mid-century architecture was built in these new neighborhoods to the south.

This southward growth amplified existing racial housing segregation. Illinois dormitories had not been open to Black students for decades. Racial covenants continued to restrict home lots to white owners in many of the new suburban neighborhoods. Housing pressure for Black families grew because of racist zoning and lending practices. Collective Black investment in postwar home ownership focused to the north, near Douglass Park, a historically Black neighborhood. Industrial zoning, segregated public housing, and factories pushed north, adjacent to these Black neighborhoods.

The architects in this exhibition do not appear to have participated in civic processes that would have created zoning reform or desegregated housing. They did participate in the cityʼs growth as designers of individual homes. Their vision of Champaign-Urbana as a cosmopolitan, avant-garde, arts-inflected small city on the prairie gave voice to a generation of patrons who could afford to invest in private expressions of postwar artistic optimism. As the buildings they designed approach and pass fifty years old, we have a collective responsibility to maintain and preserve them."

From Krannert Art Museum

FESTIVAL OF CONTEMPORARY ARTS (1948-1974)

From the late 1940s through the mid-1970s, the Festival of Contemporary Arts positioned the University of Illinois as a wellspring of visual, environmental performing, and literary arts. Held in spring-annually from 1948 to 1952, then biennially starting in 1953-the festivals showcased new works from across the US along with contributions by faculty members and students. The events garnered national attention for their variety and quality, and they were praised by academics, critics, artists, and agents alike as a gold standard for public universities.

Given the large number of exhibitions and events included in each festival, organizers needed to think creatively about where to fit everything. Already in the inaugural festival, the Exhibition of Contemporary American Painting took place in the Architecture Building, works of architecture and landscape architecture were presented in corridors of Smith Music Hall, art faculty showed at the Urbana-Lincoln Hotel, and Latzer Hall of the YMCA staged plays. As the festivals grew in size, scope, popularity, and duration (from four up to seven weeks each), the number of buildings engaged as festival venues doubled, and the challenge of finding appropriate settings —not only for display and performance but also for rehearsals-increased exponentially.

As a result, improvising with institutional spaces and encountering the arts in unexpected settings became defining aspects of festival organization and culture at the university-conditions that, in turn, influenced the thinking and expectations of local architects and their clients interested in the arts.

Sources:

Festival of Contemporary Arts: Catalogs of Exhibitions, 1948- | University of Illinois Archives