The Fritz B. Burns Academic Center

The Burns building houses the Dean's Office, the cafeteria, faculty and staff offices and the student lounge. The building's most distinctive feature is its central stairway. Professor Robert Benson, who witnessed firsthand the construction of the Law School campus, wrote:

"[Gehry's] most dramatic act is to crash the great central stairway and glass atrium into the modernist box of the Burns Building at several sharp, zigzagging angles... More subtly, he takes you up the first flight of the central stairs at an angle, with your feet facing the Burns façade straight-on while your body is jostled to the right by the handrails, all in a flight of steps which narrows rapidly in order to fool the eye into seeing greater depth through the old perspective trick of running parallel lines together."

On the second floor of the building is an oil painting of the man for whom the building is named. Fritz Burns was a noted real estate developer and philanthropist. Through his relationship with Joe Rawlinson '58, he developed a great fondness for Loyola Law School and was a generous supporter of the Law School for many years until his death in 1979.

In the Burns Building's fourth-floor atrium you can view a floor-to-ceiling bas relief, chosen specifically by Gehry, that depicts the myth of the fall of Icarus. The work represents human striving for justice, inevitable human failure and the equally inevitable renewal of human hope--all which are crucial components of the law school experience.