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Walter A. Netsch, Jr.

Architect who designed the University of Illinois-Chicago campus, dies at 88

CHICAGO - Prominent Chicago architect Walter A. Netsch Jr., who designed the University of Illinois-Chicago campus and the Cadet Chapel at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colo., has died. He was 88.

Netsch died of pneumonia Sunday at his Chicago home, said his wife, former Illinois State Sen. Dawn Clark Netsch, who was the Democratic candidate for governor in 1994.

Netsch, a Chicago native who graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and later served in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, spent nearly all of his architectural career in the Chicago office of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, where he concentrated on institutional projects.

Many of Netsch's geometrically complex buildings departed from the glass-box orthodoxy of the International Style championed by such earlier 20th century figures as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Many were vilified when they were first built, and some were even later demolished.

But many current scholars maintain that Netsch's work represents a significant break from the style of the 1950s and 1960s and anticipates the unorthodox, computer-generated shapes of such contemporary architects as Frank Gehry.