Less or more Miesian? In the midst of Chicago's famed I.I.T. campus, new buildings by Rem Koolhaas and Helmut Jahn offer radically diverse responses to the Mies van der Rohe legacy - Architecture - Illinois Institute of Technology

Art in America, Jan, 2004 by Franz Schulze

Koolhaas, for his part, has acknowledged a keen consciousness of Mies precisely insofar as he has refused to emulate trim. He claims that Mies's campus has failed to attract potential students and their parents in the "12 seconds" that normally precede an enrollment decision. Hence the emphasis on color in his building, presumably to arrest the attention of anyone driving along State Street. "Some of Mies's buildings were leading a fairly sad and doomed life. Atrophy had taken hold," Koolhaas remarked, while warning against the deification of the master. He judged his own building "a box loaded with an immense amount of pleasure." (1)

In past discussions of architecture in the contemporary city, Koolhaas has deviated from Mies in other respects. Both men acknowledge a state of modern urban disorder and confusion. But while Mies deplored that condition and sought to achieve a rational alternative, Koolhaas has chosen to "accept the world in all its sloppiness and somehow make that into a culture." (2)

That is a provocative aim, but if the Campus Center is a material reflection of it--as in many respects it appears to be--woe to the theory. There is little about the finished product that engenders acceptance of Koolhaas's thinking. Sloppy the building most certainly is, and lacking in rationality, clarity or economy, but those conditions are in this instance demonstrable negatives.

The case begins with the exterior, which from any vantage point is as crude in craft as it is unimpressive in concept. The walls of the State Street elevation, partially framed--unevenly--in their orange panels, turn eastward to form a trapezoidal space that suggests a forecourt but is nothing more than a grassy lawn whose emptiness robs the building of usable space. Overhead is the acoustic tube, which bears little formal relationship with the building, while at the north end of the west wall a 20-foot-high photographically produced portrait of Mies is segmented by structural framing that interferes with his features. Principal access to the Campus Center is gained at the southwest comes where the architectural profile is so subordinate to the tube that the building seems to have collapsed beneath it. The black on-maroon striped fascia of the south elevation extends east to the edge of the building, past the one concession to Miesian usage--the old man's famous wide-flange piers, which look totally out of place as they support the roof. The east elevation features a facade of yellow plastic screens and mullion-framed windows resembling those elsewhere in the building. But the top of each window is slightly out of plane, and where each meets the rectangular screen above, a visually crashed triangular space is left between the two incompatible wall systems. This part of the building may not be finished, but neither the architect nor I.I.T. has so far said anything to that effect. As to the north elevation, it is completely covered, again crudely and clumsily, with an insulating material painted in those black and maroon stripes. At one point the coping atop the fascia stops, unaccountably.