One of the more audacious features planned for the new $26.5 million student
center at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT), in Chicago, is a towering
25-foot-high portrait of architect Mies van der Rohe. As students and faculty
approach the building, they will be confronted by the stern gaze of the
man who designed IIT, peering out through the glass of the main entrance.
"The doors open: you walk through his mouth," explains Michael
Rock of the New York graphic-design firm 2x4, responsible for the building's
graphics. "You picture him swallowing you."
Offsite:
The Illinois Institute of Technology's Web site,
www.iit.edu/ departments/pr/ arch.comp/,
offers extensive information about the Richard H. Driehaus Foundation International
Design Competition, Koolhaas & OMA/AMO's winning design, as well as
the other finalists and their design proposals.
The metaphor wasn't lost on the architecture school at IIT, which has dwelled
under the all-consuming infiuence of the German master since he headed
it from 1938 to 1958. Mies's master plan for the main campus makes IIT one
of the most significant architectural sites in America. Thousands of
visitors come each year to see masterpieces of the International Style,
such as Crown Hall, and to wander around the campus, which was built either
directly under Mies's direction or in the master's tradition. "Mies
is a towering figure at that school," Rock says, "and that
position of blameless authority has shaped what has happened there."
Above: Visitors approaching the new McCormick Tribune
Center at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) will
see a 20-foot-high portrait of Mies van der Rohe peering out
from the main entrance. Section drawing of the student center (below).
This is no overstatement. Mies's belief that buildings can be timeless--"based
on the eternal laws of architecture: Order, Space, Proportion"--still
lies at the heart of contemporary design. It can be fiaunted or fiouted,
but not ignored. The new IIT campus center--designed by Rem Koolhaas and
his Office of Metropolitan Architecture (OMA)--of which the giant Mies
head is an element, is not only the first new structure at IIT in 25
years but the first to defy the unwritten ground rules of the campus.
Where Mies's buildings famously embrace volume over mass, regularity over
symmetry, fine proportion and elegant materials over ornament, OMA's
structure derives its aesthetic order from the idea of a busy urban intersection,
with enormous murals and multicolored graphics, crisscrossing pathways,
and diverse layered surface treatments, from fritted glass and orange plastic
walls to billowing yellow curtains. In many ways, the 110,000-square-foot
McCormick Tribune Campus Center--as it will be known when it opens in fall
2002--is the very antithesis of Mies's "less is more" dictum.
It was bound to be controversial. Criticisms leveled by Miesians at the
development, which broke ground in March last year, have ranged from charges
of "architectural vandalism" to claims that the design is inappropriate
to the grandeur of the location. Embedded in this position is the deep-seated
suspicion that there is something crass or commercial about Koolhaas's approach,
with his interest in shopping and the visual language of millennial capitalism.
Kevin Harrington, an IIT professor of architectural history who has maintained
an agnostic stance in the debate, notes, "Some of my colleagues who
think less of Rem's design characterize it as a piece of graphic design,
not as a piece of architecture."
This odd reproof accurately defines what distinguishes OMA from a traditional
architectural firm. To many architects, graphic design is a sort of
unwanted stepchild of the mother of the arts, but to OMA it is an integral
component in the creative process. "If I pride myself on one thing,
it is a talent to collaborate," Koolhaas said at a lecture last year
at IIT's architecture school. His lecture slides illustrated ongoing and
completed projects with graphic diagrams rather than photographs of buildings
or fiashy 3-D renderings. A building design for Universal Studios--an
early collaboration with 2x4--only began to make sense, Koolhaas said, when
OMA visualized it as a diagram of "potential connections." He
showed a typographic slide of intersecting words representing the parent
company's changing and diverse interests.
Above: A steel tube (left) encasing the elevated train will
run on top of the building, solving the campus's noise
problem; the student center (middle) is drawn from the idea of a busy
urban intersection; color and "supertransparent"
glass (right) help distinguish the new building from the existing
campus.
Above: The entrance to the student center (left); a public
space (middle) with rotating street-scene graphics; the food court (right).
OMA recently cemented its relationship with graphic design by opening a
New York "mirror" office, called AMO, on 2x4's premises,
with Rock as "luminary," according to Dan Wood, OMA principal
and AMO president. "We like 2x4 because they approach things without
the shackles of architecture," Wood says. "Michael is a teacher
and a writer, and takes an editorial look at things that is similar to Rem's."
Rock in turn offers a graphic designer's perspective of his architectural
collaborators. "OMA's visualized ideas are essential to the way buildings
ultimately become realized," Rock says, adding that the ideas often
become objects in their own right. "Almost every project has a series
of books designed in conjunction with it, as a way to organize and express
and create a narrative around the building."
