Nowness - Illinois Institute of Technology

Extending back to the end of the nineteenth century,
the legacy of architectural education at IIT took on in-
ternational significance with the appointment of Ludwig
Mies van der Rohe as director in 1938. Mies, a leading
figure of German modernism and the last head of the
Bauhaus, was soon also commissioned to plan the
Institute’s expanding campus. He would eventually de-
sign twenty of its buildings, including IIT Architecture’s
home in S. R. Crown Hall. For two decades, IIT was the
headquarters and laboratory from which Mies reshaped
both architectural education and architectural form in
the postwar world.
Along with former Bauhaus instructors Ludwig
Hilberseimer and Walter Peterhans, Mies established
the IIT curriculum as an extension of its famous German
predecessor and as the culmination of his own lifelong
inquiry into architecture, art, history, and philosophy.
Fundamentally, Mies’s program expressed his belief that
the shockingly new technological and social conditions
of the postwar period could be comprehended and given
aesthetic expression only when viewed in the light of ar-
chitectural history and the principles of building revealed
by this history. Practically, the curriculum led students
through a sequence of material-specific studios that
mirrored the historical evolution of architectural tech-
nology—wood, stone, brick, steel, and concrete—be-
fore presenting them with more general problems of
architecture and urban planning. While the results of
this approach became increasingly fixed for Mies—and
for many of his followers—it is crucial to recall that the
forms of Mies’s late career in Chicago wwere the product
of decades of exploration and critical reflection. It is this
legacy of sustained and historically informed inquiry,
rather than any particular formal vocabulary, that IIT
Architecture carries forward today.
The legacy of Mies’s time at IIT is also directly
materialized in the ensemble of buildings that form
the campus, as well as his many other projects in the
Chicago area. His Lake Shore Drive apartment build-
ings were developed as prototypes for metropolitan
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Legacy