Ludwig Mies van der Rohe may have been interred in Chicago’s Graceland Cemetery in 1969, but he remains the great undead of modern architecture. He lives on in his serene temples, such as Crown Hall and the IBM Building, but also in a thousand cheap knockoffs–the sterile glass skyscrapers of the past three decades and their own bastard offspring, cut-rate concrete towers like Grand Plaza and Superior Place.
Mies had been given a blank slate. A 1942 photomontage shows the entire campus sitting on a flat plinth that separates it from the city around it. The plinth didn’t make the final cut, but Mies returned to the concept throughout his career. He was more than willing to put his own buildings on a pedestal, even before anyone else was.
Mies collaborator and benefactor Phyllis Lambert, writing in the “Mies in America” catalog, found this first design “extraordinarily agitated and complicated.” But it also has a visual richness missing in the campus that was finally built; it has the complexity and contradiction argued for by architect Robert Venturi, who changed Mies’s dictum “less is more” to “less is a bore.” But Mies was on a quest for the one great truth, for what Louis Sullivan’s mathematics tutor called “demonstrations so broad as to admit of NO EXCEPTION!”
The simplicity of his design reflects Mies’s belief that there’s one best solution for every problem, and it can be discovered only through intense, dedicated study. Lambert writes, “In America, drawing became for Mies a way of thinking.” More than 1,300 sheets of exploratory drawings were made for two IIT buildings, neither of which was built, but the solutions he finally discovered found expression in the 1945 Navy Building, now the Alumni Memorial Hall, his first classroom building for the campus. The city’s building code–reflecting the lessons of the 1871 Chicago Fire, in which metal melted and buckled–prohibited leaving steel columns exposed if the structure was more than one story, so the I beams had to be encased in concrete. Mies went from the direct to the poetic, spraying concrete on the columns, then facing them with black-painted steel to create the illusion of an exposed structure.
