The College Conservatory of Music
UC West Campus, west end of Corry Boulevard
via Jefferson Avenue, Corryville;
Henry N. Cobb; 1996-99

UC's College-Conservatory provides one of the outstanding music programs in the country. The Cincinnati College of Music (founded 1878) and the Conservatory (1867) were linked in 1955 and became part of the University in 1962. The 1960s facility, set in a ravine on the south side of the West Campus, proved by the 1990s both inefficient and structurally unsound.

Henry Cobb (born 1926), now principal of (I.M.) Pei Cobb Freed & Partners of Boston and N.Y., with Cincinnati's NBBJ/Roth Partners, has redesigned the CCM complex. This incorporates the school's Corbett Auditorium (1967) and Patricia Corbett Theater (1972), with the Collegiate Tudor Memorial Hall (Tietig & Lee; 1922), formerly a dormitory and now music practice rooms, and the Beaux-Arts/Arts & Crafts former Schmidlapp Gymnasium (Garber & Woodward; 1910; see 1), remodeled as the Dieterle Vocal Arts Center. The complex welcomes students and the public drawn to CCM's top-quality music, theater, and dance performances.

Cobb responded to the complex program, stringent technical requirements including state-of-the-art electronic and computer facilities, and difficult site at the heart of the campus, creating an overall effect of calm and balanced order. The renovated older facilities have been unified by large-scale geometrical forms, such as the cylindrical new entrance from a sweeping brick-paved plaza, and a staircase that spirals around a segment of a larger cylinder at the north end, overlooking Nippert Stadium (Garber& Woodward, 1923-24; see 1). Horizontal rectangular blocks are punctuated by jutting quarter-pyramid skylights. Interiors use wood and mildly Deco styling to provide an elegant, warm environment for the performing arts, linked by memorable spaces. The horizontally grooved red-brick surfaces reduce the scale and relate CCM to older campus structures, including the Colonial Revival McMicken Hall (Charles Cellarius; 1950) and Tangeman Student Center (Hake & Hake and PWA, 1936-37 ), both inspired by Independence Hall, and to other, semi-Moderne blocks, while accommodating the bolder scale of later structures that ring the Sigma Sigma Commons. CCM lobbies open.

Other Signature Architect buildings on campus include the Edwards Center (1991; Jefferson & Corry; David M. Childs ofSOM, with Glaser Assocs.) and the Central Utility Plant (1992; Old Vine & M.L. King Drive; Cambridge Seven, with URS).