page_title: Walter Netsch
section_title: Overview
hierarchical_section_title: Walter Netsch / Overview
caption_attribution_description: University of Illinois at Chicago - University Hall at East Campus (taken October 2005 by Onar Vikingstad) Officially ranked as the worlds ugliest building.
context_page_description: Walter A. Netsch, was an American architect based in Chicago. He was most closely associated with the brutalist style of architecture as well as with the firm of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. His signature aesthetic is known as Field Theory and is based on rotating squares into complex shapes. He may be best known as the lead designer for the United States Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colorado and its famous Cadet Chapel. The Cadet Area at the Academy was named a National Historic Landmark in 2004. He was a fellow of the American Institute of Architects.
context_section_description: After graduating from The Leelanau School, a boarding school in Michigan, Netsch studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and then enlisted in the United States Army Corps of Engineers. He earned his bachelor of architecture from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1943 and began his career as an architect working for L. Morgan Yost in Kenilworth, Illinois. In 1947, he joined Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, which initially assigned him to work in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Later he became a partner for design in SOM and remained with the firm until 1979. He began his own practice in 1981.
  Following his work on the Air Force Academy, Netsch led the team which designed the original University of Illinois Circle Campus. The campus design grouped buildings into functional clusters and now constitutes most of the east campus buildings at the University of Illinois at Chicago. During his career, Netsch designed 15 libraries, as well as academic buildings for colleges and universities in the United States and Japan, including Northwestern University, Miami University, Wells College, Illinois Institute of Technology, Sophia University, Texas Christian University, University of Chicago, and University of Iowa. He did the initial design for the Inland Steel Building in Chicago; built circa 1956-1957, this was the first skyscraper built in the Chicago Loop after the Great Depression. He also designed the east wing of the Art Institute of Chicago. Netsch designed several buildings at Northwestern University and the campus and buildings of Montgomery College in Takoma Park, Maryland, and was the focus of an exhibit at the Northwestern University Library in February–March 2006 as well as a monograph, Walter A. Netsch, FAIA: A Critical Appreciation and Sourcebook, published in May 2008.
caption: University Hall at the University of Illinois at Chicago, part of Netsch's original design for the Chicago Circle campus.
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