Columbia College Chicago Master Plan

Partnering with key stakeholders, Gensler significantly transformed the look and feel of Columbia College’s campus through a new master plan, which follows the recent completion of a Student Center building, also designed by Gensler. The 10-year plan for the school campus maps physical needs to strategic goals and identifies actions to strengthen Columbia’s presence within its surrounding context in Chicago.

In collaboration with Columbia College, Gensler led a robust planning process that included stakeholder engagement (in-person, virtual, and survey-based), an in-depth campus state analysis, external trends research, an assessment of the pandemic’s impact on future planning, and a real estate land use analysis. The team then created a data-rich digital model of the campus, which includes 4,000+ individual rooms.

Centered on three key strategies of “condense,” “align,” and “amplify,” the academic campus master plan defines a more condensed central campus to strengthen the Columbia student experience and foster a sense of place. Inspired by existing buildings with successful concentrations on specific programs, the plan aligns similar programs across campus to amplify student and faculty resources, focusing on four areas of Media, Sound, Movement, and Making.