If any Chicago thoroughfare deserves a come up, it’s West Side’s downtrodden Madison Street.
And now, a spate of new projects and initiatives promises to significantly improve the long-neglected street, the latest of which is the $48 million Sankofa Village Wellness Center that officially opened a few weeks ago at 4305 W. Madison St.
The center — designed by Chicago’s Converge Architecture and the local office of Columbus Ohio-based Moody Nolan — houses a wealth of health-related services and entities, along with spaces for recreation, the arts, and healthy eating.
It’s all designed to help close a nearly 20-year lifespan between West Garfield Park residents and those who live in, say, the Loop. The Garfield Park Rite to Wellness Collaborative won the $10 million Pritzker Traubert Foundation 2022 Chicago Prize, helping the project come out.
So did the work of residents and community members who had been pushing for a facility like this.
The 60,000-square-foot building deftly juggles its myriad of uses in an attractive and nicely laid-out, community-friendly structure that shows good architecture also has a key role in fostering healthier communities.
“Using architecture as a way to catalyze the connection between healthcare and design is really fascinating,” Moody Nolan Principal Roderic Walton said. “And I do believe that this project is a case study of how a whole bunch of people can come together, unified with a single mission that we’re going to reverse that life expectancy [deficit]. We’re not going to just stand by and document it, but we’re going to actively reverse it.”
From the outside, the horizontal three-story building’s facade uses varying depths and materials to read like three contemporary structures.
The center’s silvery gray east portion contains a basketball court, and the westernmost section houses a YMCA. The middle section serves as an entry lobby and a gathering space with stadium stair seating, connecting the building’s flanking two volumes.
“It’s a big building [with] a big presence, and it didn’t want to feel out of context,” Converge Architecture Principal Lynsey Sorrell said. “And so we intentionally broke the volumes down.”
Once inside, community members can get an assortment of medical care, including substance abuse treatment, dental care and screenings.
There’s a fitness center, sports activities, childcare services and more — all in handsome surroundings with lots of color and natural light.
Service providers include Erie Family Health Centers, Rush University System for Health and YMCA of Metropolitan Chicago.
“I really do like the way the team delivered the main entry,” Will Woodley, CEO of Community Builders, the center’s developer, said. “It’s very functional. You can come in and get to where you need to be with all the different service providers, but it is also clearly very comfortable … as a place to just meet someone informally, sit down on your own or with friends or family to wait for a service or to wait for a ride — or just to be.”
Two particularly nice touches are a colorfully furnished rooftop patio with a green roof and the way the building overhangs at its main entrance, creating a small, welcoming shaded plaza right off the sidewalk along Madison Street.
“It definitely came out of a strong desire from the community to have outdoor space,” Sorrell said of the roof. “It also complements and reinforces our sustainability goals.”
Woodley said the Madison Street plaza space is important.
“That area has experienced so much disinvestment, and there are parts where you do not feel comfortable just kind of being out on the sidewalks or at the intersections,” he said. “We wanted to create a place where you could have formal events, but definitely also informal gathering inside and outside. That was definitely an intention of the stakeholders, the community stakeholders, the design team and tenants.”
The center is one of three 2022 Chicago Prize projects planned for the area. The others include the current conversion of the nearby former St. Barnabas Episcopal Church, 4241 W. Washington Blvd., into the MAAFA Center for Arts and Activism and The K Entrepreneurship Hub, planned for the northwest corner of Madison Street and Kostner Avenue.
There is also the planned $42.2 million Madison Street Athletic & Cultural Complex. The project was selected by the city in January to be built on a 1-acre city-owned site at 2905-29 W. Madison St.
Sankofa means “go back and get it” in the Twi language of Ghana, which is also a good way to describe efforts to bring the luster back to Madison Street.
“It’s exciting,” Sorrell said.