CHAMPAIGN — For as much ground as the Armory covers on the University of Illinois campus, it shouldn’t be any surprise that it takes a lot of work to keep up the 111-year-old building. In 2023 alone, over 530 work orders were submitted for the building, says Facilities and Services spokesman Steve Breitwieser. “A primary difference between the Armory and most other facilities on the Urbana campus is the large number of departments located within the facility and the wide variety of uses by those occupants,” Breitweiser says.
The Armory has a little bit of everything, from spaces intended for innovation and tech to dozens of offices and classrooms for academic departments and the ROTC alike. The center of the building, originally built as a drill hall for ROTC cadets, now hosts a track used by athletes in training — though today’s cadets still get their use out of it. Work orders handled by Facilities and Services include everything from urgent repairs to preventative maintenance, custodial work, improvements and more.
Some of the work affects all denizens of the building, like recent roof upgrades or future plans for upgrades to the east and west ends of the facility’s barrel vault with stucco and curtain-wall replacements. “That project will preserve and revitalize historic aspects of the Armory while providing considerable energy-efficiency enhancements,” Breitwieser says. Military mandate The giant structure known as the Armory today is actually the third.