Audioguides Champaign

Champaign-Urbana is really two cities grown together around the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, one of the largest research universities in the United States. In 1993, at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) on the south quad of the UIUC campus, a team led by Marc Andreessen developed Mosaic, the first graphical web browser that made the internet accessible to ordinary people. The browser changed the world and was downloaded over two million times in its first year. A plaque on the NCSA building on South Wright Street marks the spot, though the building itself is unremarkable.

The surrounding flat Illinois farmland stretches to every horizon, which gives the city an openness that takes getting used to after denser urban environments.

The architectural set piece of the UIUC campus is the Alma Mater statue on Broad Street, unveiled in 1929, and the Main Quad running from the Illini Union to the Beckman Institute. The Krannert Art Museum on Pennsylvania Avenue holds a serious collection for a mid-sized university city, including Egyptian antiquities and a strong American painting section.