University of Chicago. From the top of Rockefeller Chapel, the Main Quadrangles can be seen on the left (West), the Oriental Institute and the Chicago Theological Seminary can be seen in the center (North), and the Booth School of Business and Laboratory Schools can be seen on the right (East). The panoramic is bounded on both sides by the Midway Plaisance (South). The main campus o

 the university's Booth School of Business, which is the largest gift in the university's history and the largest gift ever to any business school.[43] In 2009, planning or construction on several new buildings, half of which cost $100 million or more, was underway.[44]
Since 2009, a two-billion dollar campaign has brought substantial expansion to the campus, including the unveiling of the Max Palevsky Residential Commons, the South Campus Residence Hall, the Gerald Ratner Athletics Center, a new hospital, and a new science building. Since 2011, major construction projects have included the Jules and Gwen Knapp Center for Biomedical Discovery, a ten-story medical research center, and further additions to the medical campus of the University of Chicago Medical Center.[45]
Campus[edit]



Many older buildings of the University of Chicago employ Collegiate Gothic architecture like that of the University of Oxford. For example, Chicago's Mitchell Tower (left) was modeled after Oxford's Magdalen Tower (right).
The campus of the University of Chicago.

The campus of the University of Chicago. From the top of Rockefeller Chapel, the Main Quadrangles can be seen on the left (West), the Oriental Institute and the Chicago Theological Seminary can be seen in the center (North), and the Booth School of Business and Laboratory Schools can be seen on the right (East). The panoramic is bounded on both sides by the Midway Plaisance (South).
The main campus of the University of Chicago consists of 211 acres (85.4 ha) in the Chicago neighborhoods of Hyde Park and Woodlawn, seven miles (11 km) south of downtown Chicago. The northern and southern portions of campus are separated by the Midway Plaisance, a large, linear park created for the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition.
The first buildings of the University of Chicago campus, which make up what is now known as the Main Quadrangles, were part of a "master plan" conceived by two University of Chicago trustees and plotted by Chicago architect Henry Ives Cobb.[46] The Main Quadrangles consist of six quadrangles, each surrounded by buildings, bordering one larger quadrangle.[47] The buildings of the Main Quadrangles were designed by Cobb, Shepley, Rutan and Coolidge, Holabird & Roche, and other architectural firms in a mixture of the Victorian Gothic and Collegiate Gothic styles, patterned on the colleges of the University of Oxford.[46] (Mitchell Tower, for example, is modeled after Oxford's Magdalen Tower,[48] and the university Commons, Hutchinson Hall, replicates Christ Church Hall.[49])
After the 1940s, the Gothic style on campus began to give way to self-consciously modern styles.[46] In 1955, Eero Saarinen was contracted to develop a second master plan, which led to the construction of buildings both north and south of the Midway, including the Laird Bell Law Quadrangle (a complex designed by Saarinen);[46] a series of arts buildings;[46] a building designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe for the university's School of Social Service Administration;,[46] a building which is to become the home of the Harris School of Public Policy Studies by Edward Durrell Stone, and the Regenstein Library, the largest building on campus, a brutalist structure designed by Walter Netsch of the Chicago firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill.[50] Another master plan, designed in 1999 and updated in 2004,[51] produced the Gerald Ratner Athletics Center (2003),[51] the Max Palevsky Residential Commons (2001),[46] South Campus Residence Hall and dining commons (2009