The prescribed program for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra Annex deals with two main groups of people: the students who would use the annex almost daily, and the patrons who use the annex more infrequently. These two groups have different needs from the annex, stemming from their frequency of use as well as what aspects of the program they use.

Instead of wrapping two different circulation spaces around a simple stacked programmatic core, I organized the sequence of programmatic spaces into a series of rotating spaces that integrate the circulation. The lower levels are more focused on serving the general public, the middle levels are frequently shared by both patrons and students, and the upper levels are more separated, for daily use by students and office workers. The main stair takes the user through all of the spaces while emphasizing the shift that occurs between each floor along the vertical axis at the center of those stairs.