Look down at the concrete sidewalk beneath your feet. Now look back up.

The year is 1914 and before you towers a 98-foot-tall arch structure, its entire front blanketed in windows. Newspapers around the world are raving about the structure, calling it “the largest in the world without a middle support.”

However, there are no other notable constructions in the surrounding vicinity but fields and fields of grass. The watch on your wrist is replaced by a pocket watch and as you check the time, you realize it is far earlier than you usually are up in the morning for class – 5 a.m. to be exact.

A group of men ages 18 to 37 round the corner of the building in their gray joggers, chanting “pack up your troubles.” Suddenly, a light bulb goes off in your head, and you realize you are witnessing history. 1914 is the beginning of World War I. People are not only fascinated by the architecture of the Armory Building, but also what took place inside.

Flashback.

Inside the building, there were rows and rows of beds for drafted men to sleep in. The men you observed running around the building were chanting patriotic verses – a common ritual before going inside the building to execute their drills and formations.

According to Campus Historic Preservation Officer Melvyn Skvarla, the original Armory was far different from the classroom building you know today, but a barracks which housed 1,500 members of the Student Army Training Corps. The Corps was a program designed to keep young men over 18 in college while preparing them for WWI.

“The University had a big program in the military science,” Winton Solberg, professor emeritus of history said. “All male students had to take military science for two years.”

Prior to the Armory’s construction, the drafted men used the Men’s Gym Annex to drill. According to Solberg, the Armory provided more than a place for the soldiers to drill in the wintertime.

“Where do you store your arms?” Solberg said. “You keep them in the Armory.”

In fact, the Armory was so valuable that during World War II, the building went under a supposed bomb threat, Solberg said. Soldiers guarded the building 103 hours a week, but the bombing never occurred.

If the Armory were bombed, however, a Chicago architect’s structural feat would go down with it. According to David M. Chasco, director of the School of Architecture, the man behind the Armory Building was state architect, William Carbys Zimmerman. At the time, the state architect was responsible for the drawings of every building in the state of Illinois, including the Armory.

The Armory’s arch construction was not coincidental. Skvarla noted that the purpose of the Armory’s three pin-hinge arch design was to provide more space for the soldiers to hold their drills without producing an echo.

“As a drill hall, they wanted to be able to march a large number of people and do various formations,” Skvarla said. “That’s why it always had a dirt floor too.”

The tree-pin-hinge arch additionally saved the building money and an additional floor to support the roof, which earned it its name for the largest construction without middle support. According to Skvarla, the Armory was completed at the relatively cheap cost of $227,000.

He placed a landscape portrait of the Armory on the table. A large arched building filled the scenery and except for tall trees in the distant background and patches of grass and dirt in the foreground.

“The area surrounding the Armory was just farmland,” Skvarla said. “This is from 1915, you can see how flat and open the area was.”

The Armory remained exclusively a barracks until 1927, when architects, Charles A. Platt and James White made a two-story brick addition that wrapped around the building you can see today, Chasco said. The addition featured the Armory’s rusticated and arched entries.

By 1962 the Armory’s interior was remodeled to include the suspended buildings and offices it houses today, according to Skvarla.

Now, the year is 2012 and before you towers a 98-foot-tall arch structure. The upper portion of the building is still blanketed in windows. However, the lower portion now features a brick addition that runs along the perimeter of the building. Both Army and Navy ROTC units frequent the Armory as the building is their headquarters. Inside the building, athletes circle the track, fully visible from the suspended classroom hallways on the third and fourth floor. As you gaze down into the track, you notice students preparing for the University’s indoor remote controlled model airplane competition.

Yet, in the back of your head, you still hear a distant chanting of “Pack Up Your Troubles.”