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9/26/13 16:41 PMMies van der Rohe Society | Projects | Illinois Institute of Technology Master Plan

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Illinois Institute of Technology Master Plan

1939 - 1958

The Story

Mies arrived in Chicago in 1938 to become the Director of Architecture at the Armour

Institute (now Illinois Institute of Technology) with the understanding that he would

redevelop the curriculum. Soon after, he was awarded the commission to redesign

the campus and its buildings, an unexpected opportunity to shape a university that

no other modern architect was given.

The campus excels in defining the relationships of campus to city, buildings tocampus, and voids to buildings. The first scheme of 1939 required the removal of

State Street to allow for a central open plaza with perimeter buildings raised on steel

columns. In the realized plan, clusters of buildings placed on a grade create a series

of informal open spaces through a playful shifting of solid (i.e. buildings) and void

(i.e. green space). A 24-foot square grid invisibly overlays the campus to guide its

order. Then, by sliding the building volumes beyond one another rather than

aligning them, Mies created expanding and contracting views, which offer a variety

of unexpected experiences, reflecting the spatial concepts in the Barcelona pavilion

on a much larger scale. Buildings define plazas without enclosing them, combining

the intimacy of a Harvard quad with the openness of Jeffersons U.Va.

Mies was dismissed as campus architect in 1958. Afterward, Skidmore, Owings and

Merrill added buildings based on Miess plan, most notably the Paul V. Galvin

Library and Hermann Hall, which served as the student union until the opening of

the McCormick Tribune Campus Center in 2003.

Why its important.

The campus plan stands as the first instance in which Mies used the grid as an

organizing principle. According to Phyllis Lambert, it was "perhaps an idea derived

from the 5-acre Chicago city block, an American urban grid distinctly different from

the winding streets, enclosed squares and axial alignment of European planning."

What people say.

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"It is the beautiful ambiguity of the IIT campus that the status of its built substance

oscillates between object and tissue, that its modules imply potential extension yet

end emphatically, that its structures hover between recessive foreground and

prominent background." Rem Koolhaas, 2001