Above: The Mies-designed Crown Hall (top &
bottom left). The elevated train bisecting campus (bottom right).
Bubble-dot lettering of a Mies font, developed by 2x4.
student center (below).
When 2x4 was invited in 1998 to help develop the IIT scheme, OMA had already
won an international competition--which included participants such as Zaha
Hadid and Peter Eisenman--with one such narrative. Simply put, the dense
urban backdrop against which Mies had originally designed his spacious,
airy campus had disappeared. As the university had expanded in size, the
number of students had diminished. In 1941 there were 6,000 students on
57 acres of land; in 1998 there were 3,200 students on 120 acres. As Katja
Ackermann, a former architecture student at IIT, recalls, the place had
come to feel desolate. Prospective students often took one look at the site
and chose someplace else. "There's not enough to do there," Ackermann
says. "The campus is an island surrounded by a run-down neighborhood.
If you don't have a car, you're pretty isolated."
The onus for the design team, OMA argued, was to "re-urbanize the void
...occupy the largest territory with the least mass to create urban liveliness."
Rather than stacking the student facilities in a structure designed for
visual impact, as the master plan for the site suggested, the new building
would fiatten and spread them out to fill the void. This would
prevent the dorms to the east of the campus--already cauterized by the clattering
elevated train--from being ostracized by the facade of a tall building.
From the beginning the task for 2x4 was to think big and bold. Graphics
had to be supersized to help add mass: "Subtlety was never an issue,"
says 2x4 designer Conny Purtill. "The design was always meant to fill
space." In addition, the visual treatment of surfaces needed to help
enliven and articulate the functions of a building that could not be defined
by a sectional drawing. "A one-story building is one of the toughest
architectural problems there is," Wood says, "because it's all
about the composition. From the beginning we knew that materials and graphics
were going to be extremely important, to create variety and life."
Above: A series of rotating billboards will animate
walls in the student center.
Setting the tenor for this intersection was OMA's boldest visual motif--a
huge steel tube encasing the elevated train as it rattled overhead. Like
a futuristic conveyance, or perhaps some relic uncovered during excavation
and buffed to a shimmer, the above-ground tunnel would solve the noise problem
that made movement between campus and the dorms so miserable. "Conversations
stop when a train goes by," says Terry Frigo, director of design and
construction at IIT's facilities department. By muffiing the El with
the tube and situating its building underneath, the design team could utilize
the existing student pathways under the El as the organizing principles
of its new building's interior. The campus center as a bustling meeting
place full of various functions would thus take its cues from the existing
paths.
A striking example of OMA and 2x4's integrated approach is in the development
of wayfinding graphics--or lack thereof. Conventionally an architect
subcontracts a graphic-design firm to add signs toward the end of the
development process. With the IIT campus center, early design iterations
dotted the building with a directional signage system, including Karen Hsu's
witty Otl Aicher--style pictograms that illustrate the more human aspects
of what goes on at a university: international symbols for peeing and cheating,
for example. As the scheme progressed, however, it became increasingly clear
to 2x4 that directions would be unnecessary for students using the site
on a daily basis. Besides, one of the emerging features of the building
was the interplay of surface materials. To unify this with a standardized
signage system seemed to run against the eclectic spirit of the center.
Above:
A glass corridor (top) designed with images of the architect's
head (bottom left & right).
Simplifying navigation is the fact that amenities in the building--bar,
auditorium, bookstore, club, chapel, shopping, food court--are arranged
around the old paths. They are further defined with the help of the
diverse palette of surface materials: plastic and plywood, leather and glass,
silk and concrete. Where needed, signs will be made of the same materials--letters
cut out of a wood wall or drilled into surfaces (using a Paul Elliman font
based on dot matrix type). Considerable effort was made to mix and layer
high and low finishes: one wall of the auditorium, visible through
the glass exterior, is covered with wallpaper by the artist Do Ho Suh; some
doors are finished in upholstery; other surfaces reveal images. A giant
smiley face made of colored dots, printed on refiective vinyl and applied
to the interior surface of a glass facade, beams out over the campus like
a parody of a stained-glass window. And in what seems like a conscious thumbing
of the nose at the monochrome Modernist architectural photography tradition
and the steel and glass of Mies's palette, the western facade gained a bright
orange exterior wall.
Criticisms were forthcoming, of course. Franz Schulze, author of the book
Mies van der Rohe: A Critical Biography, was quoted in the Chicago
Tribune describing the building a "no great solution" and
criticizing the working model for its "weird colors." Frigo recalls
how some IIT students and faculty found the groovy graphics "disrespectful."
In fact, the design team's response to Mies's looming presence might be
better described as gently iconoclastic. Koolhaas professes to a long-standing
love of Mies, and 2x4 consistently employs a visual clarity in its work
reminiscent of the language of Modernism--if not the ideology.
