The Field House has served more functions than nearly any other structure on campus. During the Depression years, it provided cheap accommodations for nearly 100 students who paid $1 per week to rent a cot and locker on the third floor. Built to incorporate a preexisting armory (1922) at the west end, it functioned as a barracks for the Navy Pre-Flight Training Program during World War II. Its real business, however, has always been sports; it was the home of Hawkeye basketball until 1982, a history that spanned fifty-six seasons. Today it hosts intercollegiate, intramural, and recreational activities, teams, and events.
The original floor of the Field House was dirt, which made it ideal for track and field events. The building included what was then the largest indoor collegiate swimming pool in the United States, which was meant to double as a reservoir for fire fighting. The interior also contained spaces for every indoor sport or activity offered by the Uni- versity. On the exterior and in keeping with its neighbors—Hillcrest and Quadrangle Halls—Collegiate Gothic was used to enhance what was otherwise a rather utilitarian façade. Three sets of limestone- tipped spur buttresses project above the massive brick façade and mark the entrance-stair towers for approaching visitors. Arched win- dows over the portals and at the clerestory above admit generous light to the interior but also give the basilica-like building a Roman gravitas. Ornamental touches—including heraldic shields—are apparent in the archival photograph. Since the addition of a Modernist adminis- trative wing against the east façade in 1955, these features are mostly obscured. The Armory was demolished in 1989 to make way for the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics’ John Pappajohn Pavilion, but the great steel arch on the rear façade of the Field House still reveals the point at which the two structures were once joined. A second remnant was also retained: a large hawk in flight that once hovered over the original competition basketball court.