Illinois Institute of Technology
Chicago, USA
Situated due south of Chicago centre, the campus of the Illinois Institute of Technology is one of the most complete and emblematic campus environments of the 20th Century. Product of the architect Mies van der Rohe, who directed the department of architecture after the closure of the Bauhaus, the IIT Campus was a lesson in the the architect’s own theory of ‘universal space’ and Miesian urbanism.
IIT is located on State Street, a main street which forms a linear axis from the city to the campus, extending the universal Chicago grid southbound to superimpose an invisible order over the site. The campus site along major infrastructure routes into the city had been designated a ‘blighted’ zone, which enabled its total redevelopment for the expanding Armour Institute, later to become Illinois Institute of Technology. Only the original building of the Armour Institute was retained, otherwise a tabula rasa condition would be imposed through the demolition of all structures over the site, which encompassed multiple city blocks, displacing existing residents to nearby housing projects. The newly levelled site, with the exception of the remaining solitary building bore no traces of a previous condition, or palimpsest, other than the vestigial grid of roads which bisected the new campus superblock.
The planning of the campus was derived from a schematic operation in which the dimension of all parts of the overall campus, major or minor, would be determined by the size of the smallest components. First, an inventory of typical furniture dimensions was collected, such as desks, workbenches, and drafting tables. Second, the furniture was arrayed according to capacity to inform the dimension of standard rooms, such as classrooms, labs, and drafting rooms. Thirdly, the standard rooms were arrayed on the grid according to a schedule of accommodation, in order to establish the basic parameters for each building. Finally, each building was sited on the planning grid and, in the initial masterplan, atypical forms such as auditoria projected out from the standard footprint to express themselves as exceptions to the rule.
This operation through the scales, working from the inside-out and from the smallest element to the largest, reflected the Miesian rationalist understanding of space, adopted from industrial architects derivation of structure from the dimensions of industrial machinery. Following the basic spatial requirements of the schematic operation, the technological order and structural grid of the campus could be extrapolated with a direct relationship to the activities which informed its properties and frequency. At the IIT Campus, the optimal structural module was identified at a 24ft square grid extended indiscriminately over the site. Rather than begin with an ideological stance apropos the idealism of the university which prevailed in postwar campus planning, the IIT Campus was planned primarily through the technological vehicle of structural and spatial planning which in itself is indifferent to the purpose of Higher Education.
This basis of space reflects the Miesian concept of universal space, which would enable freedom of use by the university and thus unlock the utopianism of the campus. This theory holds that a clear span architectural skeleton is the minimum and therefore the optimum form for accommodating changing uses throughout a buildings lifespan. While this theory finds its proper expression in column-free interiors, such as Crown Hall (the department for architecture), the spatial indeterminacy provided by a minimal tectonic armature on a grid also provided opportunity for future modification with little resistance. Whilst the 24ft grid was considered a universal device for setting-out the structural grid and layout of campus buildings, exception was made for Crown Hall, whose free plan interior reifies the theory of Universal Space. Within the hall, space is partitioned within the continuous interior to form localised pockets of activity informally enclosed by furniture-like elements.
The interior arrangement of Crown Hall is a miniature of the campus as a whole. The hall is a topology - an activated spatial field - which compresses at points of intensity and event and is rarefied in areas to form clearings within the relational space of the interior. As consequence, the interior urbanism of Crown Hall can be understood as a key through which to understand the campus as a whole: as an ordered and rhythmic field punctuated by incidental moments of compression and rarefaction, activation and dissipation. Universal space, such as the non prescriptive interior of the hall, is not so much about the extension of space as much as it is about the maximisation of potential use. The regulatory logic of the planning grid controls the hand of the architect, yet the hand of the user is free to use space as they wish.
The initial campus plan proposed two symmetrical arrangements of buildings mirrored over a transverse street (33rd), which crossed perpendicular to State Street. Two ostensibly identical rectangular buildings faced one another across a defined quadrangle bisected by 33rd Street, whilst smaller elongated building forms were shifted in plan on either side of the main buildings to enclose the sides of the quad from State Street. The mirrored plan created a balanced but static composition of buildings only enlivened by the irregular forms of the auditoria which projected into the space of the quadrangle.
As the campus planning continued in tandem with Mies’ tenure at IIT the symmetrical rigidity of the masterplan began to transform into a less formal but nevertheless balanced composition. In later iterations of the plan, as a larger site became available, the spacing and regularity of the arrangement began to loosen to favour an alternating spatial arrangement where the figure ground would flip between figure and void with a less predictable rhythm. Throughout Mies held to the grid field imposed over the site however, as specific spatial requirements for individual buildings became apparent, Mies allowed individual building footprints to extend or contract, offset by a few squares on the grid so that building forms would appear to slip past one another. While maintaining the logic of the grid inherent to both the internal organisation of the campus and the city equally, the internal logic of each piece of the campus puzzle revitalised the grid which had stultified space in the city.
The more the masterplan deviated from the symmetry of the original plan, the more rhythmic the relationships between landscape and between buildings became. Buildings were prised apart, and space which was initially bounded and firmly enclosed was extended to segue from one quadrangle to the next through their open corners. Marginal overlap between buildings gave a semblance of the archetypal academic quadrangle, yet the prairie like expanse and diagonal views between buildings diminished the static formality of the plan. The final campus plan as built has an open grid form where space floods around the campus building, whose interrelationship resembles boats moored in a harbour than firmly locked buildings on a campus. Forms which drift past each other pinch space and create a relational value which reaffirms a cohesive campus quality, yet simultaneously drift apart so that some buildings appear like marooned ships in a sea of space.
The most surprising absence at the IIT Campus is that of a physical boundary to the estate. Where other campuses define the extent of the academic enclave through wall, change in condition, or building arrangement, the IIT Campus is open to its environs, rendering it a porous environment and suggesting the extension of its spatial field. Indeed, the conscious extension, or proliferation of Miesian urbanism trialled at the campus can be found in localised moments within the city proper. The spatial arrangement of buildings which are offset in plan to create diagonal rather than strictly parallel alignment would characterise Miesian projects in Chicago. From municipal precincts and plazas, to residential tower complexes, to commercial building clusters, the informal slipped plan transposed the spatiality of the campus to the city manifesting a different kind of universal space.
The planning of the IIT Campus was more than a mere operation in space planning, but a manifesto in how the grid of the American city could evolve to activate the orthogonal space of the grid with oblique movement and dissolution of a hard street edge. The campus internalised the city grid but in the place of rigid geometries which defined a hard street edge, open space was allowed to permeate the campus superblock to equate landscape to architecture. For Mies, IIT was a lesson in how campus planning could reform city planning in a test environment, which he later implemented in many urban schemes in Chicago proper. By adhering to the city’s cardinal grid, and deconstructing its totalising properties, Mies demonstrated how simple deformations on a plan could substitute formal axiality of the American street for the diagonal movement across a city block, how unrelenting linearity could be substituted for the liquid qualities of space, and how the metronomic rhythm of the isotropic street grid could be syncopated through spatial compression and release.
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