Crosley Tower

Crosley Tower

Crosley tower, built in 1969, was one of a series of high-rise buildings erected on campus in that era. Power Crosley Jr., a UC alumnus, was an entrepreneur and inventor who owned the Crosley Radio Company in Cincinnati; the tower is named in honor of him and his family. It’s a “totem” of the University in the 60’s and 70’s because of the University’s fascination with tower-like buildings around that decade. Most of these towers were built to house students and, as Paul Bennett explains, to convey that the University was sophisticated, worldly, and urbane like most big cities of the world in keeping up with the trend of this decade of constructing towering buildings.[i]

Crosley Today (Bennett, 2001) (UC Archives and Rare Books Library)

A local firm, A.M. Kinney Associates, designed Crosley as a square, fluted pylon that is supposed to rise into the sky. Bennett tells us it’s “formed by massive concrete buttresses or columns that flare at the top like the hands of a supplicant.” This is supposed to be in an abstracted Corinthian fashion similar to Rieveschl Hall, but in Crosley Hall the ventilation shafts for the chemistry labs rise upward through the flutes in the tower. The entire complex of buildings around what’s now known as Library Square, including Rhodes, Zimmer, Rieveschl, and Crosley, was once known as the Brodie Science Complex, “a change indicative of how campus architecture has become stuffed full of significant names and laden with all sorts of dedicatory appellations.” [ii]

Brodie Compley Site Plan (A. M. Kinney Associates)

By the late 1960s, Brodie Hall and Crosley Tower were in place. Construction began on Crosley in 1964, but the building was not completed until around July of 1969. Crosley was to be the first of six high rises recommended in a 1963 master plan for the Northwest (Burnett Woods) sector of campus. Other towers already in place were Calhoun, Siddal, and Daniels, all of which are residential buildings.[iii]

Crosley upon completion (UC Archives and Rare Books Library) Artist rendering of Crosley (A. M. Kinney Associates)

In June of 1963, plans for Crosley were laid out based on the “critical need to provide additional space to house the activities, both undergraduate and graduate, of the Chemistry Department.” At the time, undergraduate chemistry enrollments were projected to double or triple in the following decade. Post-construction, the University estimated an increase of 10,000 undergraduate and graduate students. Plans for lecture halls and classrooms assumed large class sizes, including auditoriums that could accommodate anywhere from 150 to 700 students and classrooms to fit anywhere from 40 to 75 students. Planners estimated 1.25 million square feet of laboratory, classrooms, and instructional space. A 1964 planning summary on the construction of Crosley Tower and what is now known as Rieveschl Hall, authored by A. M. Kinney Associates and Charles Burchard, stated that the purpose of building Crosley was to provide orderly growth over the next twenty years for the future expansion of science and engineering. Building Crosley would help increase enrollment, expand research, intensify instructional offerings, and “implement increased graduate programs in accordance with the long-range academic plans of the University.” [iv]

(UC Archives and Rare Books Library) Brodie Complex 1974 (UC Archives and Rare Books Library)

As constructed, Crosley tower stands sixteen stories, housing seminar rooms, graduate research facilities, faculty offices, and a science library. With 16 stories at 7,000 square feet per floor, Crosley has a total of 112,000 square feet. Total construction costs in 1964 were approximately $3.4 million. [v]

1970s (UC Archives and Rare Books Library)

[i] Bennett, pg 54.

[ii] Bennett, pg. 61

[iii] University of Cincinnati: The Master Plan September 1991. Hargreaves Associates, 1991.

[iv] A. M. Kinney Associates, and Charles Burchard. Chemistry Building at The University of Cincinnati. University of Cincinnati, 1963. University of Cincinnati Archives and Rare Books Library, Cincinnati, OH.

[v] A. M. Kinney Associates.