IIT: The Million-Dollar Sermon and Mies van der Rohe
Near Chicago Lake Michigan, Illinois
In eighteen ninety, a Chicago minister named Frank Gunsaulus delivered a sermon with a very specific thesis. He told his congregation that with one million dollars, he could build a school where students of every background could train for meaningful work in an industrial society. Philip Danforth Armour, the meatpacking titan whose Union Stock Yards had made him one of the wealthiest men in America, was in the pew that day. He walked up afterward and told Gunsaulus he would give him the million dollars. The Armour Institute of Technology opened three years later.
The Armour Institute merged with the Lewis Institute in nineteen forty to become the Illinois Institute of Technology. Two years earlier, in nineteen thirty-eight, the Armour Institute had made a decision that would define its physical character for generations: it hired Ludwig Mies van der Rohe to lead its architecture school and design its campus.
Mies had just fled Nazi Germany, where he had directed the Bauhaus school until the regime shut it down. He arrived in Chicago with a philosophy as austere as it was radical. His campus plan for IIT covered roughly fifty hectares of the Douglas neighborhood on Chicago's South Side. Over the next two decades he designed twenty buildings for the school, making the IIT campus the single largest concentration of his work in the world.
The centerpiece is S. R. Crown Hall, completed in nineteen fifty-six and housing the College of Architecture. Mies solved a structural problem with breathtaking simplicity: rather than placing columns inside the building, he hung the roof from massive steel girders above, freeing the entire interior from columns entirely. The result is a single vast room of glass and steel that can be rearranged into almost any configuration. Crown Hall was designated a National Historic Landmark in two thousand one.
Gunsaulus's million-dollar sermon built a school. Mies turned that school into a living manifesto for what modern architecture could be.
