University of Illinois Plans Computer Science Building

The University of Illinois at Chicago is moving ahead with plans to start work on its $115 million computer science building.

Scheduled to begin in the spring, the building will provide 135,000 square feet of classroom, lab, study, office and conference space, Crain’s reported. It will rise on Taylor Street — part of a handful of new buildings the university is developing — and be completed in 2023.

The expansion comes despite the university grappling with financial strain as a result of the pandemic, the report noted.

Still, the University of Illinois System — which includes campuses in Chicago, Champaign-Urbana and Springfield — reported record student enrollment this year. The headcount of computer science students is expected to grow 40 percent by 2025, Peter Nelson, dean of UIC’s College of Engineering, told Crain’s.

“The true bottleneck is that we don’t have any place to put faculty members,” Nelson told Crain’s.

In February, Related Midwest unveiled plans at its megadevelopment The 78 for what would be the University of Illinois’ Discovery Partners Institute. The university agreed to build what it calls a state-of-the-art facility with public and private funds.

In late 2018, the University of Illinois announced it would spend more than $1 billion to construct nine new buildings and retool public infrastructure across campus during the next decade.

[Crain’s] — Sasha Jones