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Less or more Miesian? In the midst of Chicago's famed I.I.T. campus, new buildings by Rem Koolhaas and Helmut Jahn offer radically diverse responses to the Mies van der Rohe legacy - Architecture - Illinois Institute of Technology
Art in America, Jan, 2004 by Franz Schulze
The Illinois Institute of Technology's chief claim to architectural fame rests with Mies van der Rohe, who was responsible for the plan of the Chicago campus, conceived between 1939 and 1941, and for 22 buildings, the last dating from 1956. Following Mies's retirement from his post as head of the school's architecture department in 1958, other architects added to that number, but the last of their efforts was realized in 1971, and in the intervening three decades, no work of any consequence has appeared on the campus.
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That was the case until 2003, when complexes by two internationally recognized architects were completed to considerable fanfare. In July, a row of dormitories by Helmut Jahn of the Chicago firm of Murphy/Jahn opened for occupancy; late in September, they were joined by the McCormick Tribune Campus Center--a student union--by Rem Koolhaas, Office of Metropolitan Architecture, Rotterdam. Both structures connect the academic part of the campus on the west with the social and residential part on the east. They are located across from each other oil East 33rd Street, parallel to an elevated train track that runs just east of South State Street, the campus's main thoroughfare.
Such proximity, however, stands more for confrontation than for kinship. The buildings are strikingly different in form and function. Jahn's dormitories, collectively labeled State Street Village, consist of six five-story traits in three pairs, each made up of two wings flanking a courtyard planted with birches. At the rear of each court is a high-tech glass wall that rises to the full height of the building. Symmetry rules. The structure is reinforced concrete, with bare floors and ceilings, its roof and front elevations dressed in corrugated stainless-steel panels and dark-gray-tinted windows framed in aluminum. The profile describes a gentle convex curve.
Contrasting with the orderly rhythm of the dormitories, Koolhaas's one story Campus Center is freewheeling in its radical asymmetry. The plan traces, or so the designer has claimed, the irregular paths and shortcuts that students followed as they traversed the campus when the site was empty. Walkways, platforms and sitting areas cross, rise and dip in a riot of diagonals and alternating levels. Koolhaas's palette is as variegated as Jahn's is coolly neutral. The facade is bedecked with bright orange glass-cure-plastic panels, and the fascias, like many of the inner walls, are painted with colors rendered in aggressively uneven vertical stripes. The floors that are not carpeted are laid hl aluminum tiles or coated with epoxy resin in a variety of hues.
The interior treatments of the two ensembles reflect the difference in their functions. Jahn's dormitories are organized simply and methodically, with space for 367 undergraduate and graduate students in 66 suites and 32 kitchen-equipped apartments. Common areas include lounges, laundry rooms, trash disposal sites, computer facilities and roof decks that overlook the main campus. The furniture was also designed by Jahn. The Campus Center, on the other hand, embraces a broad assortment of spaces serving a comparably complex variety of activities. The largest areas are taken up by a bait room, a theater, a bookstore, a sports bar and a conference room. Smaller spaces are given over to a faculty-staff dining room, a radio station, a coffee bar, billiard and Ping-Pong halls, a convenience store, an internal courtyard, a corridor lined with computer stations, a suspended bridge filled with plants, an information bureau and a welcome center, the latter devoted to relating the story of I.I.T. and its immediate neighborhood. Wall graphics make up an important part of the building's program, with an abstracted standing figure as the most repeated symbol. Variations in the size and position of that motif (credited to the New York design studio 2 x 4) have been used to create over-life-size portraits of Mies and several of the university's founders. In the northeast corner of Koolhaas's plan is the once freestanding Commons building, designed by Mies and finished in 1954. It will serve as the main student dining area.
One major component, which dominates the building, is as simple as the others are complicated. An elliptically sectioned concrete tube, sheathed in corrugated stainless steel, runs directly overhead, its upper are open to the sky. Largely encasing 530 running feet of the elevated track, it is intended to muffle the noise of the trains. Since the bottom of the tube is considerably lower than the tracks, a good deal of earth had to be excavated to provide enough space for the building proper. In order to grant the west front of the Campus Center a respectable height, Koolhaas canted the roof to accommodate the tube, leaving a roughly V-shaped south elevation.
Given Mies's place in I.I.T. history, Jahn and Koolhaas could not help but be aware of his memory as they pursued their respective designs. Though Jahn spent some time as a student at the university, he never studied with Mies. The approach he has developed in his own practice is, however, generically akin to Mies's well-known expressive use of steel and glass. Thus the dorms look stylistically comfortable across State Street from Crown Hall, the most important Mies building at I.I.T.
