Louis I. Rocah

Associate Professor

lrocah@uic.edu

Louis Rocah received his BA degree in Architecture from the University of California, Berkeley. While a student at UC he worked for Joseph Esherick (who would later get the AIA Gold Medal) as well as other San Francisco architects. He received his M Sc in Architecture from IIT, where he spent two years studying with Mies van der Rohe (and also to a lesser extent, with Ludwig Hilberseimer).

Shortly after graduation he became a member of the design team for the Air Force Academy, headed by Walter Netsch, at SOM. After that he worked for Bertrand Goldberg on the final design phase of Marina City and the supervision of its construction.

In 1962 he opened his own office, which produced some industrial buildings, private houses, low cost housing, and urban design projects. There were a couple of AIA awards and exhibits at museums in Munich, Paris, Brussels, and the MCA in Chicago.

During a twelve year interval as a Supervising Architect in the City of Chicago's Bureau of Architecture (which no longer exits) he designed the Forest Park terminal at the end of the Blue Line and major renovations of the subway stations of the O'Hare extension. He also designed the Westlawn branch of the Chicago Public Library.

Louis Rocah began to teach at UIC when the School of Architecture became a full degree granting school in 1966- convinced that practice and academia are mutually reinforcing at the conceptual level.