IIT: Mies van der Rohe's Modernist Masterwork

The campus spreading out on either side of you is one of the most architecturally significant collections of buildings in the United States. Nearly everything you see was designed by the same man: Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who had directed the Bauhaus school in Germany before fleeing the Nazis and arriving in Chicago in nineteen thirty-eight.

Within a year of his arrival, Mies was hired as head of architecture at what was then called the Armour Institute of Technology, and commissioned to design a master plan for a new campus on the South Side. The institution had been founded in eighteen ninety when a Chicago meatpacking magnate named Philip Danforth Armour, moved by a sermon about what a million dollars could build, gave exactly that amount to create a school where students of all backgrounds could learn engineering and architecture. It merged with the Lewis Institute in nineteen forty to become the Illinois Institute of Technology.

Over the following two decades, Mies designed many of the buildings on the campus, developing his ideas about what architecture in the industrial age could be. Steel frames. Curtain walls of glass. Column-free open interiors that could adapt to different uses over time. The crown of the campus is Crown Hall, completed in nineteen fifty-six, which houses the architecture school and is often called Mies's finest single work. Its enormous glass and steel box is suspended from four plate girders above, leaving the entire interior completely free of columns. It received National Historic Landmark status in two thousand one.

Mies taught at IIT for twenty years, and his ideas about the relationship between structure and space became the dominant influence on American commercial architecture for a generation. The glass-and-steel office buildings that define the skyline of virtually every American city owe their character in large part to what Mies worked out on this campus.