I visited the IIT Campus in Chicago recently. The school is said to be undergoing a resurgence of sorts and given its status in architectural history one of the strongest points is the architecture department itself and the university's recent architectural makeover featuring a Rem Koolhaas-designed student center and Helmut Jahn-designed student housing. But IIT's jewel is the aptly named Crown Hall, a Mies Van Der Rohe building from the late 1950's. It looks great after a recent restoration, clean like a Mies building should look. The last time I saw it rust and peeling paint pocked the steel trusses and decorative columns. Wait... decorative? Mies? Decorative?Well yes. The building is simply supported by four large trusses that allow the building to be completely open on the inside. Basically the ceiling is hung from the trusses. But the four trusses evenly distributed along the width of the building meant that there were no columns on the outside to break up the space and provide natural gaps so for fenestration. If you look closely at the picture to the left you see steel beams that are attached to the sides of the building but appear to do no structural work.
Here's a close-up of the corner and a pic of the entrance that shows two of the trusses holding the building up:
The Paul Galvin library on the IIT campus was designed to fit in with Mies' Crown Hall. but a funny thing is that while Crown placed more or less decorative beams on the side with the ostensible purpose of breaking up space and providing a rhythm for fenestration the Galvin library borrows the truss idea from Crown Hall and turns it into its own version of the hanging steel columns by placing large steel beams on the rook of the building with little or no structural purpose. In fact the way it looks is that form clearly preceded function and most likely added a great deal of weight to the roof. And there is little relationship, at least on the large scale of the rhythm of the beam placement and the window placement. And the entrance, lacking the subtle and beautiful stairs of Crown Hall, is obscured behind shrubbery:
Crown Hall's symmetry on all sides precludes the idea of hierarchy in the exterior arrangement - that is the back looks the same as the front, giving no inherent idea as to where the entrance is. So essentially Crown Hall has two similar entrances, one on the north side and one on the south. The south entrance is more open, has the marble staircase and is the most visible and therefore the "main" entrance. But the north entrance faces a small quad of sorts, a sunken grass yard with benches that provides a social space to sit, play frisbee, whatever, and considering it's just across the street from the Jahn housing buildings it should be used quite a bit. However, to paraphrase a Robert Indiana text painting I've seen, every building needs it's hind part and in Crown Hall it unortunately faces this quad. The hind part isn't as messy as it could be, although it's obvious that any building, symmetrical or not, needs a place for trash removal and such. So a potentially strong public face is obscured by its dual role as its' rear end.
It's not so bad but it's far from sexy. Basement stairs, small dumpsters, parking for motorcycles and bikes locked to the railings aren't necessarily bad but they do signify an ad hoc approach to the rear, let's say, functions of a building such as waste removal. The extreme symmetry and lack of strong design hierarchy is an aspect of modernist architecture that looks great on paper but is stained by the messy reality of humans occupying and actually using the space.
This is not to say I don't like the building but just that it does prove the trusim about utopian thinking that it just doesn't jive with reality. But here to end are some pics which show how the building looks in its site and how, as an exhibition in the building shows, Mies' simplicity was influenced by Japanese buildings like tea houses and how timber, plaster and rice paper were reinterpreted in 20th-century materials.
Crown Hall's symmetry on all sides precludes the idea of hierarchy in the exterior arrangement - that is the back looks the same as the front, giving no inherent idea as to where the entrance is. So essentially Crown Hall has two similar entrances, one on the north side and one on the south. The south entrance is more open, has the marble staircase and is the most visible and therefore the "main" entrance. But the north entrance faces a small quad of sorts, a sunken grass yard with benches that provides a social space to sit, play frisbee, whatever, and considering it's just across the street from the Jahn housing buildings it should be used quite a bit. However, to paraphrase a Robert Indiana text painting I've seen, every building needs it's hind part and in Crown Hall it unortunately faces this quad. The hind part isn't as messy as it could be, although it's obvious that any building, symmetrical or not, needs a place for trash removal and such. So a potentially strong public face is obscured by its dual role as its' rear end.
It's not so bad but it's far from sexy. Basement stairs, small dumpsters, parking for motorcycles and bikes locked to the railings aren't necessarily bad but they do signify an ad hoc approach to the rear, let's say, functions of a building such as waste removal. The extreme symmetry and lack of strong design hierarchy is an aspect of modernist architecture that looks great on paper but is stained by the messy reality of humans occupying and actually using the space.This is not to say I don't like the building but just that it does prove the trusim about utopian thinking that it just doesn't jive with reality. But here to end are some pics which show how the building looks in its site and how, as an exhibition in the building shows, Mies' simplicity was influenced by Japanese buildings like tea houses and how timber, plaster and rice paper were reinterpreted in 20th-century materials.
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