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 Page 3 The Mies head on the doors of the western entrance, for example, is actually pragmatic--a direct result of the need to explain who this guy was. Ackermann, who used to give guided tours of the campus, notes that Mies appreciation vanishes outside the walls of the architecture school. "It's tough to get across to students that they are studying at a pretty significant place," she says. OMA and 2x4 's initial response to this lack of respect for the old master--to turn the whole building into a Mies interpretive center--gave way to various "Miesian gestures," executed in a similar spirit of cheeky homage. A glass corridor connecting the university club to a gallery space was designed with images of Mies's head from photographs taken throughout his life. Rock refers to it as an "aging Mies wall." Mies trees--the precise outline drawings of trees that he applied to his architectural renderings--are etched into the glass facade of the southwestern wall. Behind this facade Mies's outline drawings of human figures will be incorporated in a design for an oversize curtain by Petra Blaisse. The most subtle Mies homage sums up the critical position inherent in the new building. In researching the architect's legacy, 2x4 discovered that he had designed a sans serif typeface. Though clearly aspiring to be one of those universal fonts that could eliminate the need for all others, Mies's typeface is not as refined as his architecture. So 2x4 chose to execute the quirky Mies type as foot-high stainless-steel letters and apply it to the various entrances of the building. Miesians no doubt will applaud. Others will note, with Rock, that "the attempt to use universal forms and the style of the type now seems so much part of that era. It's very idiosyncratic." For all its striving for timelessness, the International Style is cemented in history. Controversy has continued to cloud the campus center, even as the steel tube is being erected. The Miesians' biggest bone of contention was that the pavilion-like Commons Building, which in 1953 received an American Institute of Architects' award, would be adjoined to the new center. The most vocal of the critics, Chicago architect and preservationist John Vinci, wrote a letter to the Chicago Tribune in March decrying the scheme and asking whether the city had been "blinded by the glamour of hiring outside celebrity architects." He subsequently suggested in the Tribune a month later that OMA revise the plan to make the Commons Building a visitor center with at least 48 feet of respectful distance between it and his structure. Because the university had received a $9 million state FIRST grant to finance construction of the tube, city preservation officials determined that Vinci's complaints should be heard, and some compromises were made. OMA retracted its roof slightly so that it did not overhang the Commons, and altered the joint between its new structure and the original so that it bore a resemblance to an existing joint on campus made by Mies's office in 1956. The surrounding facade was changed to what Wood calls a "supertransparent" glass, to make the distinction between old and new visible. The alterations did little to quiet the voices of dissent. Vinci greeted the revised design as a "setback for preservation." But as IIT's dean of architecture Donna Robertson points out, by making the Commons part of the new building OMA was able to use program money to undertake a much-needed renovation of the original. "They found a way to accommodate the Commons, which we had no expectations for. It became program space for the Campus Center, using existing funds." The prominent role of graphic design in the scheme continues to trouble some of those who have been observing the building's development. Harrington, for one, is concerned that there is little precedent for OMA's narrative-based approach. "Rem is a particularly articulate spokesman, who in using language should use irony and inversion, but I'm not sure he understands that architecture isn't language. I don't think architecture deals well with irony. What may very well happen is that what is seen as a witty response will in a couple of years seem 'so 2001' and dismissed. That's a risk that he runs." In many ways, the battle over the IIT student center design is the vivid enactment of a postmodern dilemma: how to deal with the anxiety of infiuence imposed by the Modernist tradition. As Wood observes, it was clearly impossible to design a building at IIT and ignore the Mies legacy. Another scheme might have sidestepped the confrontation by taking a more formalist approach, but OMA and 2x4--for better or worse--went for the jugular. The resulting development, with its fragmented concrete roof ducking under the gigantic silver tube--wrapped train, its mishmash of materials, its juxtaposition of opaqueness and translucency, and its graphic moments of brash Miesian deference may not be the most elegant building on campus--but it could easily become the most popular. For there is at least one respect in which this building goes one better than Mies's architecture: the McCormick Tribune Campus Center is designed from the inside out, with the students' needs carving out the shape of the structure. Mies's spaces, by contrast, are famously criticized for failing to accommodate the activities they were designed to contain. The test of the new building's success will be in its provision for Modernism's failings. |
