Nowness - Illinois Institute of Technology

Certainly the most rigorous school of architecture in the United States at
the end of the Second World War, the Illinois Institute of Technology may
be seen in retrospect as a school of building art, as a Bauschule in fact,
rather than a school of architecture with a capital “A” in the time-honored
humanist sense. Beyond achieving the simplest programmatic solution
possible to any given brief with a goal to achieving optimum flexibility by
maximizing the span, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe urged his acolytes and
students to concentrate on the sobriety of elegant construction rather than
indulging in gratuitous formal plasticity. As we know, Mies aspired to a
transcendent technology that would embody a dematerialized spirituality in
his famous “almost nothing” with which to compensate, as it were, for the
inescapable uprootedness of the late modern world. The trajectory of his
career, along with that of the IIT graduates who followed his lead, remained
neutral before the dissolution of the city into the placelessness of the
megalopolis. In this regard, Ludwig Hilberseimer and Alfred Caldwell were
able to mediate Mies’s tectonic objectivity through their mutual vision of
transcendent ex-urban landscape.
The appointment of the distinguished Dutch architect Wiel Arets to
the directorship of the IIT College of Architecture stands to inaugurate an
entirely new epoch in the evolution of this institution—most surely because
Arets has long since demonstrated his prowess as both an architect and
an educator: first with his library for the University of Utrecht and second,
with his inspiring leadership of the Berlage Institute in Amsterdam from
1995 to 2002. The pedagogical shift inherent in this appointment opens
the prospect of a reinvigorated IIT as an objective Bauschule for the
twenty-first century. This recent pedagogical stance must surely aspire to a
rigorous architecture in which the liberative serviceability of the space-form
must be given priority along with the durability and sustainability of the
built-fabric over a broad front, ranging from the least embodied energy to
the careful calibration of the cultural status of the work. For as Mies ironically
acknowledged, every building is a cathedral. At the same time such a
modulated building culture should strive to widen our concept of technological
rationality to include both the socio-psychological and bio-ecological
well-being of the subject. Finally, above all, it is imperative that the design
of landscape be fully incorporated into the architectural curriculum.
Kenneth Frampton, 13 March 2013
Contents
Approach
Legacy
Nowness
Programs
Network
Resources
Facts
Chicago
Approach
Legacy
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Inaugural
Address as Director of Architecture at IIT
Remarks on IIT’s Legacy
Nowness
Wiel Arets in Conversation with John
Ronan, Sean Keller, Robert McCarter, and
Stanley Tigerman
Wiel Arets, Inaugural Address as Dean of
Architecture at IIT
Programs of Study
Bachelor of Architecture
Master of Architecture
Master of Landscape Architecture
Master of Science in Architecture
Doctor of Philosophy in Architecture
Global Network
Public Programs
Publications and Media
Study Abroad
Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitats
Mies Crown Hall North America Prize
Morgenstern Visiting Chair
Innovation Center
Mies van der Rohe Society
Resources
Our Address
McCormick Tribune Campus Center
Graham Architecture Library
Workshop and Design/Build Studios
Basic Facts
Degrees Offered
Admissions and Scholarships
Summer Opportunities
Community
Colophon
Chicago
Metropolitan Events
Favorite Places
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