Located at the southwest corner of Ellis Avenue and 55th Street, the Ratner Center has an award-winning design that uses a complex external mast-and-counterweight system instead of interior support devices, allowing for large open-space areas inside the building.

[4] He was a Phi Beta Kappa graduate and played for the baseball team during the time that the university participated in the Big Ten Conference.

In addition to a general fitness center, it includes a multipurpose dance studio; classroom and meeting room space; permanent and day lockers and locker rooms; the University of Chicago Athletics Hall of Fame; and the athletic department offices.

The competition gym, which is the southernmost building,[8] accommodates practice and game site for varsity basketball, volleyball, and wrestling, but is convertible into two recreational courts.

[18] The center is available to university and hospital faculty, staff, alumni, and retirees as well as their spouses and children on a paid membership basis and registered students for free.

[21] The facilities memberships are available to students as well as University and hospital faculty, staff, alumni and retirees, as well as spouses and children.

[8] Each mast is composed of three 18-inch (46 cm) diameter steel hollow structural sections (HSS) filled with high-strength concrete that are arranged in a tapered tied-column configuration.

[7] During construction, the masts were filled with 10,000 pounds per square inch (69,000,000 Pa) cast-in-place concrete using innovative pumping techniques.

[7] Concrete counterweights totaling 2,500 cubic yards (1,911 m3) — with some as large as 50 by 25 by 13 feet (15.2 by 7.6 by 4.0 m) — counteract the weight of the roof from below the ground.

[8] The exterior support design made the interior space more receptive to open natural lighting and more accommodating for free movement.

The curved roof planes are suspended from German "full-lock" steel cables and include three outer layers of interlocking Z-shaped wires designed to minimize water infiltration and corrosion.

Mast displacements could significantly alter cable length and tension and redistribute loads through the superstructure contrary to design.

The sites natural underlying subsurface conditions were stiff silty clay below a medium dense sand layer, which was determined to be too accommodating to settlement to host the structure.

Ground improvement, consisting of triple-fluid jet grouting, was performed to reduce the compressibility of the silty clay, stiffen the sand deposit and provide a desirable shallow foundation system.