Facilities

The guiding principle behind Columbia 2010's goal is to create a campus environment that builds community and fosters learning. Columbia seeks to create a lively arts district outside the walls of the college a vibrant, stimulating South Loop neighborhood filled with galleries, museums, theaters, screening rooms, coffee houses, bookstores, and clubs and envisions an equally stimulating classroom and campus living environment.

To this end, the college established the Office of Campus Environment and installed Alicia Mazur Berg, former commissioner of planning and development for the city of Chicago, as its first vice president. Berg's office quickly launched plans to improve and preserve Columbia's properties (many of which have historic value), enhance the functionality of nineteenth- and twentieth-century buildings for twenty-first-century technologies and educational needs, and heighten the college's visibility and creative identity within the heterogeneous cityscape.