College of architecture.

Mies first large-scale, clear-span, universal-space building (120 X 220 X 18

feet). It took the form of a unitary space in which, as Mies saw it, an assortment of function and tasks
could be carried out modified or even changed, with optimal flexibility. He spent only two year in S.R.
Crown Hall before retiring from the faculty in 1958. Before that, he was conducting his classes for
almost decades in the Art Institute of Chicago and several commercial offices in downtown until he
moved in 1947 to Alumni Memorial Hall on IIT campus.

archivitz

Crown Hall

Nothing better expresses Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's philosophy than S. R. Crown Hall,
home to the College of Architecture, and a modern masterpiece that Time magazine calls "one
of the world's most influential, inspiring and astonishing structures."

Designed by Mies in 1956, Crown Hall cohesively represents his architectural concepts and
theories in their most complete and mature form. A National Historic Landmark, Crown Hall
is a straightforward expression of construction and materiality, which allows the structure to
transcend into art. Its refinement and innovation place it among the most distinguished
buildings of its age and define its importance in the history of architecture.

The column-free open plan of the main floor of Crown Hall demonstrates Mies' innovative
concept of creating universal space that can be infinitely adapted to changing use. Its
expansive size of 120' x 220' feet in floor area, with a ceiling height of 18 feet, allows
individual classes to be held simultaneously without disruption while maintaining creative
interaction between faculty and students.

The roof of the building is suspended from the underside of four steel plate girders. The
girders are themselves supported by eight exterior steel columns, spaced at 60 foot intervals.
The interior is divided by free-standing oak partitions that demark spaces for classes, lectures
and exhibits.

Tour groups regularly come and go.

The recent restoration of Crown Hall's exterior received the 2006 Richard H. Driehaus
Foundation Preservation Award  for Project of the Year from Landmark Illinois, a
2006 Citation of Merit from AIA Chicago, and a 2005 Honor Award from Chicago
Landmarks Commission.
Mies van der Rohe

Photo courtesy of the Chicago History Museum

Modern architecture began in Chicago in the 1890's with the groundbreaking work of creative
pioneers including Sullivan, Burnham, Jenny, Root and Wright. Their fiercely independent
style led these world- renowned "Chicago School" architects

In 1938 the Armour Institute of Technology, a modest technical training school on Chicago's
near south side, engaged German- born architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886- 1969) as
the director of the Department of Architecture. The school strove to transform its traditional
architecture program into one of international stature and innovation; Mies was a logical
choice for achieving this goal. He had achieved international recognition at the forefront of
modern architecture and established a reputation in the field of architectural education while
serving as director of the Bauhaus school of design in Germany from 1930 through 1933.

After relocating to Chicago in 1938, Mies reshaped the architectural education of the Armour
Institute and developed a disciplined curriculum to be carried out in a cooperative
environment. Interaction was encouraged between students and a faculty comprised of
professionals from a wide range of design disciplines. The curriculum encompassed
progressive, Bauhaus- inspired courses on the visual and tactile characteristics of materials as
well as fundamental classes on drawing and construction techniques. Students began their
education with the methods and materials of architecture to provide them a sound foundation
for future studies. Only when students fully grasped the basic concepts were they gradually
advanced to applying these principles to building design.

Mies viewed architecture as embodying multiple levels of value, extending from the entirely
functional to the realm of pure art. He also believed, through his interpretation of history, that
the aim of architecture is to truly represent its epoch, and that the architect must search out
and articulate the significance of the time.

Click here for information on the Mies van der Rohe Society.

At GRC

The Graham Resource Center has compiled a study collection of books, oral histories,
television programs, and journal and newspaper articles on all things Mies. Below is a list of
folder numbers and corresponding citations on a wider range of topics, including biographical
works, architectural criticism, and IIT history.
Mies study collection (xls - MS Excel format)
Mies study collection (html format)

An additional  list of Mies works, built and unbuilt, is organized by alphabetically,

chronologically and by location.

http://library.iit.edu/grc/mies/

Crown Hall Renovation

By the Numbers

▪ Number of glass lites (panes): 340

▪ Weight of eleven and one half by nine and one half foot upper glass lite: 700 lbs.

▪ Number of steel glass stops: 816

▪ Number of steel glass stop screws: 6,256

▪ Total weight of glass installed: 66,312 pounds

▪ Total gallons of primer: 280

▪ Total gallons of Paint: 800

Crown Hall dazzles in Mies simplicity: IIT renovation a design triumph

By Blair Kamin, Chicago Tribune architecture critic

Chicago, Aug. 21, 2005 — Chicago Tribune—The renovation of Crown Hall, Ludwig Mies
van der Rohe's masterpiece at the Illinois Institute of Technology, will be celebrated with a
splashy gala Thursday night—and the result truly is worth celebrating, not only because it
looks so good but also because it tells us so much about Mies that we didn't know before.

To come upon the freshly renovated pavilion, with its original steel frame painted crisp "Mies
black" and its new panes of glass dazzlingly clear, is to step back in time to a simpler
America, of Davy Crockett coonskin caps and Levittown Cape Cods, where a building like
this would have seemed utterly revolutionary. To see it is to see Mies as the daring figure he
truly was, not the cigar-smoking demigod who built gray flannel-suit architecture for the
Establishment.

Carried out by Mark Sexton of Krueck & Sexton Architects and consultant Gunny Harboe of
McClier, the three-month, $3.6 million project is a triumph of historic preservation, one that
underscores the need to save some of the very midcentury modernist landmarks that
postmodernists unfairly maligned a generation ago. Chicago's Stanley Tigerman even created
a photo collage, "The Titanic," which showed a listing Crown Hall sinking into the sea.

Located at 3360 S. State St. and home to IIT's College of Architecture since its opening in
1956, Crown Hall has weathered such foolish bashing and gone on to become a National
Historic Landmark and an official Chicago landmark. It is the high church of "less is more,"
as perfectly proportioned as a symmetrical Greek temple, but far more skeletal, like the
French Gothic cathedrals whose flying buttresses opened the way for diaphanous walls of
richly colored stained-glass.

Even this Notre Dame of High Modernism needs TLC from time to time, however, which put
Sexton and Harboe in a tricky position: Modern building codes called for thicker windows
and stronger window frames than those Mies used. But if the architects changed the look of
the Crown Hall one iota, they'd set off an international firestorm. Some old hands at IIT, who
worked with Mies, publicly questioned details of the renovation.

Yet now that the project is complete, it's clear that the architects have achieved the right
balance between bringing Crown Hall into the 21st Century and restoring its mid-20th
Century aesthetic—and thus bringing to life the ideas Mies and his building so brilliantly
conveyed.

A dazzling object

The renovated Crown Hall is, first and foremost, a dazzling aesthetic object, and not simply
because its fresh coat of heavy-duty industrial paint (a brand called Tnemec, cement spelled
backward) makes it stand out like a man in a black tuxedo against the blue August sky.

The building's new sheathing—big upper-level windows and, beneath them, smaller pairs of
translucent windows with a sandblasted inner layer—correctly restores Crown's transparency,
an essential part of what Mies, in his mystical High Lama way, called the architecture of
"almost nothing."

The upper windows are thicker than their predecessors, but they do not look green, as thick
windows are wont to do, because they are made of special low-iron glass. And instead of
resembling shiny plastic panels, as the lower windows did after a mid-1970s renovation by
Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, the new ones suggest Japanese shoji screens, working in sync
with the big sheets of glass above them. As Sexton correctly observes: "The building is a
unified whole. Before it looked like glass and plastic."

Combine this new openness with the new crisp outlines of the steel frame, previously a dull
gray, and you have a stunning combination of skin and bone, void and solid. It must have
blown away people in the 1950s who still thought of buildings as masses of masonry, not
prisms of steel and glass.
Because of the renovation, Crown Hall no longer seems standoffishly insular. It is a welcome
shock to walk by and see the ghostly outline of a construction worker behind one of the new
lower walls. This is not the isolated "object building" criticized by the postmodernists. It is
subtly, but unmistakably, a part of the city.

Surprises inside

Inside are more pleasant surprises, from the buffed black terrazzo floor to the spray-painted
white ceiling tiles (nicely cleaned up from the mess they were before). What they add up to is
a space of transcendent calm, at least until the next round of architecture students starts piling
up mounds of drawings and models.

The newly sharp view out the big upper windows reveals the surrounding trees of Mies'
landscape architect Alfred Caldwell. Their organic, sinuous outlines create a poetic contrast
with the machinelike, right-angled quality of the architecture. Again, you see that this is not a
building in a vacuum. Mies' designs invariably were site-specific. They just didn't imitate
everything around them, as the postmodernists did.

But the most welcome change comes in the softly diffused light admitted by the lower
windows.

Skidmore's renovation used laminated glass, which made these windows too reflective, like
mirrors. Their replacements are far more translucent. You can look through them and see
inklings of the greenness of the grass and the blueness of the sky. It is an Arctic spectrum of
different shades of white—a very narrow spectrum compared to the hot orange walls of Rem
Koolhaas' IIT campus center, but a spectrum of icy beauty nonetheless.

And what of the most controversial detail of the renovation, the thin metal frames, or stops,
that prevent the upper windows from falling out?

In a marked departure from Mies' incessantly right-angled architecture, Sexton designed these
replacement parts with a teeny diagonal. They are 5/8 of an inch thick on the outside (to
maintain the proportions of the original) and 3/4 of an inch thick on the inside (to provide
enough "bite" to meet modern building codes).

This custom-designed detail didn't sit well with old hands at IIT who argued it departed from
Mies' philosophy of using materials off-the-shelf or straight out of the factory. As if to support
their point, the renovation's glossy new paint makes visible the stamps of the companies that
made Crown Hall's steel, Bethlehem Steel and U.S. Steel.

Visual purity

But if there is certain philosophical impurity to the new stops, they do nothing to impinge
upon Crown Hall's visual purity. Besides, Mies himself could be far more flexible than his
disciples. He demonstrated that most memorably in the 860 and 880 North Lake Shore Drive
apartment buildings (featured in today's Tribune magazine), where he abandoned rigid
rationalism for the subjective step of attaching decorative I-beams to the facades. Why did he
do that? Without the I-beams, he said, the buildings simply "did not look right."
A genuine problem at Crown Hall, as Sexton acknowledges, are the garishly white vertical
bands of fabric that hold together Crown Hall's new window blinds. They stick out like extra-
fat pinstripes on a dark suit. They need a lot of yellowing from the sun so they can fade into
the background. Fortunately, as Sexton notes, they will be removed in the next phase of
Crown Hall's renovation, which calls for the building to be made more "green," or energy-
efficient.

Despite that fault, the renovation of Crown Hall is a major success, one that represents the
latest step forward for IIT's once-forlorn urban campus. But the ramifications of what has
been done extend far beyond the South Side. They remind us why Mies was the great figure
he was—he was both poet and pragmatist, bold in his art yet sensitive to his surroundings. He
was the most influential architect of the 20th Century yet only now, at the beginning of the
21st, can we see his vision with the full clarity it deserves.

Courtesy of the Chicago Tribune

Crown Center

On Saturday, August 27th, the Illinois Institute of Technology unveiled the newly renovated,
more beautiful than ever, S.R. Crown Hall. The masterpiece of a building was designed by
Mies van der Rohe in the early 1950's and finished construction in 1956. Described by Time
Magazine as "the world's most influential, inspiring and astonishing structures" Crown Hall is
a breathtaking, free space; intimidating with its jet black, sharp lines, while entirely inviting
and open with its gigantic windows. A visit to the IIT campus always feels like a trip into the
a perfect future, but never more so than in the newly shiny Crown Hall.

Because we're such fans here - Crown Hall is the spiritual home of our MoOM, The Museum
of Online Museums - and to our way of thinking, one of the most important buildings
anywhere, we went out for the celebration and shot more photos than where probably needed
and brought along the video camera too. Steve put together the short montage above set to the
opening of Steve Reich's Music for 18 Musicians. Enjoy.
Crown Hall is home to the College of Architecture at Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago and
was designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, it’s one-time director. Photographed by  Bill Engdahl,
1956

Crown Hall Postcard--Build Your Own Chicago

This glass and steel pavilion was designed by Mies van der Rohe as the home of the
Department of Architecture at Illinois Institute of Technology and completed in 1956.
Four 120-foot girders provide support for the roof, creating one continuous open
interior space for classes and exhibitions. This card includes all pieces and
instructions necessary to make a complete paper model at 1:1000 scale, approx. 1.5"
tall x 3" wide. All the cards in the Build Your Own Chicago series are mailable
postcards, with space on the reverse for a stamp and address and a message. Each
card also includes a short but informative description of the landmark the model
represents. Instructions are included in the form of multi-lingual isometric diagrams.
Ther is also a Build Your Own New York series.

IIT - S. R. Crown Hall

Completed in 1956, S.R. Crown Hall is considered one of Mies van der Rohe’s greatest
masterpieces. Its significance by its being listed both a National Historic Landmark and a City
of Chicago Landmark prior to its turning fifty years old.

The two story steel and glass building has an open column free floor plan of 120 feet by 220
feet making the building a total of approximately 52,000 square feet. It exemplified Mies’s
desire to create “universal space” and it proportions and detailing are legendary. It was
created to house Mies’ school of architecture for the Illinois Institute of Technology and it
continues in the function to this day. In 1975, the building underwent a major renovation
which replaced all the original glass and it was repainted. The next thirty years saw little real
change, and virtually no maintenance. The result was an extensive deterioration to the glazing
system and a need for a major renovation.
After preparing a Historic Structure Report, Harboe Architects personnel, who were then
working for McClier, served as preservation architects for the award winning restoration of
the glass and steel facades lead by Krueck and Sexton Architects. Harboe Architects served as
preservation architects for Fujikawa, Johnson & Gobel Architects on the restoration of the
south porch. The restoration was completed in the late summer of 2005.

 Complete Project Information

o

Title IIT - S. R. Crown Hall

Work Completed Historic Structure Report and Full Exterior Renovation

Date Completed Summer, 2005

 Landmarks Preservation Council of

Illinois – Richard H. Driehaus Foundation Preservation
Project of the Year, 2006
Awards  AIA Chicago – Distinguished Building
Award – Certificate of Merit, 2006
 City of Chicago Commission on
Landmarks - 2005 Preservation Excellence Award

Client Illinois Institute of Technology

Location Chicago, Illinois

Contractor Clune Construction

Metal and Window

Krueck & Sexton
Architect of Record

South Porch Architect

Fujikawa Johnson Gobel Architects
of Record

The Window Problem. The 68 original lites of the upper panels were replaced with PPG Starphire
(low iron) glass, and the cycle of problems and solutions continued. The new panels weighed 700
pounds, making them too heavy for the original stops. The stops had to be enlarged from 51⁄48 inch
to 31⁄44 inch in depth. As the wall sections [original (far left) and new detail; click on images to
enlarge] show, this redesign is subtle enough to be called invisible. However, it has a slope. Mock-
ups confirmed that a deeper reveal would look heavy. Sexton argued that by sloping the stop from
31⁄44 inch at the glass to 51/48 inch at face, it would read the same as the original. The architects
convinced skeptical purists that, first of all, the slope cannot be seen. And secondly, compromising
on the custom-design issue was better than specifying a heavy, and thus inappropriate, stock stop.