Mies.
Even now, 28 years after his death, the mere mention of his name inspires respect, a certain awe. For decades, architects have been imitating him, reacting against him, reinterpreting him. Mies, whose full name was Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, dropped aphorisms the way the Daley family wins elections: “Less is more,” “God is in the details,” “We don’t invent a new architecture every Monday morning.”
“Build. Don’t talk,” he said in that terse, no-nonsense way of his, so well-attuned to a blue-collar burg like Chicago.
And yet, of course, this German-born son of a stonemason, who apprenticed in his family’s tombstone business in the medieval city of Aachen, did talk, particularly after imbibing a few martinis.
What he said and, more important, what he built, changed the world, or at least the way a good deal of it looks.
Now, in an exercise that has enormous promise as well as pitfalls, five architectural firms from around the world are vying to design a $25 million campus center for the Illinois Institute of Technology that will be built across State Street from Mies’ renowned temple of steel and glass, Crown Hall.
Theirs is the daunting task of coming to terms with one of the great architects of the 20th Centuryand of using one of his supreme creative achievements, Crown Hall, as a foil for establishing an architecture for the 21st Century.
“It’s undeniable. There he is,” said Mack Scogin, the Atlanta architect who chairs the five-member jury that winnowed a field of 39 entrants two weeks ago and will pick a winner in February. “You’re looking at the face of the guy. He’s staring you in the eye.”
The stakes, it can be said without too much hyperbole, are as high as the Sears Tower and the John Hancock Center, both by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill of Chicago, a firm that once followed Miesian precepts so religiously that it was jokingly tabbed “Three Blind Mies.”
The competition provides a chance to light a creative spark in Chicago, which has hardly set the world on fire of late with such backward-looking behemoths as the Harold Washington Library Center. With a new building boom going on here, the example IIT sets is particularly important.
More broadly, the contest begs a question implicit in the “Beyond Mies” title of a symposium IIT will hold next month: What’s next for modern architecture, which for better and for worse has stamped cities across the world with its signature, abstract forms of concrete, steel and glass?
IIT and its president, Lew Collens, deserve praise for acting boldly and staging this competition, even if it happens to be true that a high-profile design contest is about the best way, short of having Princess Di visit your campus or getting your underdog football team to the Rose Bowl, of getting loads of free publicity.
Art and risk are inseparable, and IIT, which has set for itself the mission of exploring the future through teaching and research, ought to be commended for putting its money (or, more precisely, the money of donors Robert Pritzker and Robert Galvin, who last year made a $120 million grant to the school) where its mouth is. Underscoring the contest’s experimental nature, the finalists were selected on the basis of philosophical statements and their portfolios rather than drawings and models of the campus center, which they now must prepare.
A further measure of the university’s risk can be discerned by comparing one of the five finalists, Chicago’s Helmut Jahn, with the rest of the field. In the 1980s, Jahn earned the nickname Flash Gordon when he built such ultramodern extravaganzas as the James R. Thompson Center (the former State of Illinois Center), which was initially bedeviled by a balky air-conditioning system that turned offices into free employee saunas.
Now, he seems the safe choice.
`Train-wreck architecture’
Three other finalists–Peter Eisenman of New York City, Zaha Hadid of London, and Rem Koolhaas of Rotterdam–are associated to varying degrees with an approach to design known as Deconstructivism, which tilts, warps and bends conventional, right-angled geometries to create buildings that seem frozen in place the moment after an earthquake. To some, the unprecedented shapes of these buildings, which typically are made possible by computer-aided design, represent the face of future. Others call them “train-wreck architecture.”
To be fair, Eisenman, Hadid and Koolhaas have evolved since New York’s Museum of Modern Art included them in its 1988 show, “Deconstructivist Architecture.” Each has made the transition from theory to practice, though Koolhaas, perhaps, remains better known for books than buildings. Published in 1995, his cinderblock-sized “Small, Medium, Large, Extra-Large” was a paean to big buildings and those sprawling metropolitan areas, like Atlanta, that he labels, without disapproval, the “Generic City.”
Jahn, too, has matured since his Flash Gordon period, turning out ever more sophisticated buildings that explore the limits of materials, such as high-strength, structural glass. That he has teamed with Stuttgart engineer Werner Sobekfor the contest firmly places him in the vaunted Chicago tradition of creating new forms through new technologies.
Not much is known about the fifth finalists, Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa of Tokyo, other than that they practice a minimalist brand of modernism that seems serene and Zen-like, especially in contrast to the explosive forms of the Deconstructivists.
In making these adventurous choices, and in bypassing such established figures as Britain’s Norman Foster, the jury clearly indicated its preference for pushing the architectural envelope through designs rich in ideas. As much as that is in keeping with the way IIT once gave Mies a chance to realize his largely untested theories, it nonetheless carries a potential downside, like the baseball slugger who swings for the fences, but instead strikes out.
Certainly, a major disappointment is that one of the heavy hitters who was invited to the competition, Los Angeles architect Frank Gehry, declined to participate. In the Spanish ship-building city of Bilbao, Gehry in October will complete a branch of New York’s Guggenheim Museum, which, by all accounts, is a swooping, titanium-clad tour de force. Yet as great as that building may be, it raises an issue at the heart of the postmodern critique of Mies: Can anybody else do it?
Mies, after all, designed icons like Crown Hall and the pathbreaking apartment high-rises at 860 and 880 North Lake Shore Drive. But all too many of the Miesians, following the master’s rules but lacking his creative spirit, produced lifeless downtown mega-developments, such as Chicago’s Illinois Center, or deadly public housing projects like Cabrini-Green–Poor Man’s Mies.
The IIT campus itself shows how difficult it has proved to make Mies’ urban vision work.
After fleeing Hitler’s Germany, where he was director of the Bauhaus, Mies headed IIT’s College of Architecture from 1938 to 1958 and designed the master plan for its campus, as well as several of its key buildings. He intended the school to be a “campus in a park,” with low-slung brick and steel buildings different from the walled collegiate compounds of Oxford and Cambridge.
Today, however, the old three-flats along State Street, which bracketed his gleaming campus, are gone, wiped out by parking lots. One of those lots–the campus center site, at 33rd and State Streets and on a diagonal across State from Crown Hall — represents modernism’s ground zero. From the CTA trains that screech by every few minutes to the battered public housing high-rises that loom just to the south, it is about as real as cities get–an acid test for testing theory. As Chicago’s Stanley Tigerman said after the finalists were named, it’s “put up or shut up” time for the avant-garde.
To stand in the parking lot is to understand how important it is to ground this building in everyday reality, The campus center will have to do much more than keep out the racket of the El. It will have to build bridges to IIT’s neighbors or, to change metaphors, weave new strands across a gash in the urban fabric.
A meeting place
IIT pointedly has refrained from referring to the building, which is to provide a meeting place between academic buildings west of the El tracks and existing student housing to the east, as a student center. The center not only will house gathering places especially designated for students, but it also will include such things as a copy store, a book store and a convenience store that may appeal to those who live in the resurgent Bronzeville district. There also will be a Mies interpretive center when the building opens, probably in the year 2000.
Here is a rare opportunity to close gaps of town and gown, the upwardly mobile and the underclass. Above all, then, the campus center demands that the finalists reach beyond the eye-popping images of their work that regularly appear in glossy magazines to define, in deeply humanistic terms, the purposes of innovation.
Mies, it is easy to forget, was every bit a humanist.
As the architectural historian Reyner Banham wrote in a 1986 essay that commemorated the 100th anniversary of Mies’ birth, he taught his students to fret over the convenient design of baggage claim areas and the comfortable height of door handles, as well as the properties of brick and steel.
A technocrat would dryly recite the facts of engineering in articulating why a building’s form should derive directly from the columns and beams that supported it. Mies quoted St. Augustine: “Beauty is the splendor of truth.” Wrongly labeled a functionalist, he was above all an artist who sought to distill and express the spirit of his times.
Where, then, to begin the quest for a humanistic campus center?
With the people who will use it. And with its hard-scrabble site.
When Mies designed the campus in the 1940s, IIT was a commuter school that mostly drew its student body from throughout Chicago, and its buildings were austere classroom and laboratory structures. Today, many students live on or near the campus, but come from around the globe. According to IIT’s portfolio for the competition, the question around which the contest revolves is “this functional expansion of the campus, from a specialized technical workplace into a fully supportive living community.”
“Building community” has become a buzzword of the nostalgic, city planning movement known as the New Urbanism. Now, the finalists have a chance to pose a modernist alternative. In addition to the campus center itself, they are supposed to draw plans for new student housing, flanking the building along the elevated tracks. How will their computer-age community different from the New Urbanist vision of the horse-and-buggy era?
And, of course, how will they engage Mies?
They can neither mimic nor ignore him. They must at once respect and move beyond him.
At their disposal are new technologies, materials and ideas unavailable to him, as well as American culture that could not be more different from the buttoned-down Eisenhower era of Mies’ day. Sprawl is pulling it apart. The Internet is drawing it together. How all this might be expressed in a building is anybody’s guess.
The jury chair, Scogin, seems to understand both the gravity of the urban context at IIT and the heady prospect of establishing a new direction for modernism. He does not expect the finalists to come in with “flashy, idiosyncratic buildings.”
Let us hope that his fellow jury members agree and that they and the finalists will spare us A) train-wreck architecture by the El train tracks; B) a generic building for a generic city (this is Chicago, not Atlanta); and C) a trendy, idiosyncratic design that will get splashed on magazine covers next year–and look utterly dated a decade from now.
Instead, the competition might give us a building that is of its time and for all time; one that not only expresses the human condition, but also addresses the condition of humans.
To pull that off, the architects would do well to remember the words of Mies, who, in his 1938 address at IIT, stated an eternal truth: In contrast to the shifting winds of fashion, architecture is first and foremost a building art.
“We must make clear, step by step what things are possible, necessary and significant,” he said. “Education . . . must lead us from chance and arbitrariness to rational clarity and intellectual order. . . . Therefore let us guide our students over the road of discipline from materials, through function, to creative work. Let us lead them into the healthy world of primitive building methods, where there was meaning in every stroke of an ax, expression in every bite of a chisel.”
MIES SYMPOSIUM
In conjuncton with its design competition for a $25 million campus center, the Illinois Institute of Technology is holding a symposium Sept. 12-13 in which distinguished architects and historians will address the work of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.
The symposium, free and open to the public, begins with a keynote speech by Michael Hays, professor of architectural theory at Harvard University, on Sept. 12 at 5:30 p.m. at IIT’s Siegel Hall, 3301 S. Dearborn St. Hays will discuss Mies’ work in the context of contemporary culture.
On Sept. 13, Mies biographer Franz Schulze will moderate a panel discussion, “Beyond Mies.” The panel will include two jurors in the competition, New York City architect James Ingo Freed and Phyllis Lambert, director of the Canadian Center for Architecture in Montreal, as well as Mies’ grandson, Chicago architect Dirk Lohan.
The panel will start at 9:30 a.m. at Crown Hall, 3360 S. State St. and will be preceded at 9 a.m. by the introduction of the five finalists in the competition.
Other lecturers and panelists on Sept. 13 include Columbia University professor of architecture Kenneth Frampton; Joan Ockman, director of Columbia’s Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture, and Robert Bruegmann, architectural historian at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
For more information, call IIT’s public relations office, 312-567-3104, or its College of Architecture, 312-567-3230.
