Wright College, Chicago, Illinois, Axonometric

Goldberg’s last major project was Wright College, a five-building campus for the Chicago community-college system, which was designed and built from 1987 to 1992. In this design, he strove to incorporate ideas about the changing nature of higher education, including the role of computers in the organization of knowledge for the educational process. The architect’s scheme focused on the Learning Resource Center, an impressively scaled pyramidal structure containing the library and computer labs, which is connected to three other buildings by futuristic suspended walkways. Standing apart from the Miesian vocabulary of many civic works in Chicago, it can perhaps be most closely compared to Helmut Jahn’s State of Illinois/James R. Thompson Center (1979–85) for its structural expression and dependence on geometry as an organizing scheme, while also recalling contemporary works such as I. M. Pei’s pyramid addition to the Musée du Louvre in Paris.