Illinois Institute of Technology Academic Campus
The Illinois Institute of Technology Academic Campus is one of the five campuses of the Illinois Institute of Technology, located on the South Side of Chicago, Illinois, United States. It is located in the Douglas community area and is roughly bounded by 30th Street, Michigan Avenue, 35th Street, and the Rock Island District railroad line. Parts of the campus, comprising 26 buildings between 31st, State, and 35th streets and the Rock Island railroad, are designated as a National Register of Historic Places historic district. The campus includes buildings constructed both by IIT and one of its predecessors, the Armour Institute, which was established in the neighborhood in 1890. Its layout is derived from a master plan devised in the 1940s by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the director of IIT's architecture school from 1938 to 1958.
The Armour Institute included five buildings, three of which still exist. The extant buildings were all designed by Patton & Fisher in the Romanesque style, with red brick and stone facades. When the Armour Institute merged with the Lewis Institute in 1940, Mies was hired to design a master plan for IIT's campus. The first building under his master plan was completed in 1943, and Mies continued to oversee the design until his resignation in 1958. Mies's designs are generally low-rise structures with concrete or steel exterior frames and brick-and-glass facades, although some designs, such as S. R. Crown Hall, deviated from this trend.
After Mies's resignation, Walter Netsch and Myron Goldsmith of Skidmore, Owings, & Merrill each designed multiple buildings for the campus, largely adhering to Mies's designs. The local firm of Schmidt, Garden & Erikson designed additional buildings for the IIT Research Institute. SOM and another firm, Mittelbusher & Tourtelot, designed additional buildings such as dormitories and fraternity houses, which are not included in the NRHP district. After Mies's master plan was completed in 1971, no significant construction occurred for more than two decades. Rem Koolhaas's McCormick Tribune Campus Center and Helmut Jahn's State Street Village were both completed in 2003, and a technology building by John Ronan Architects opened in 2018.
Site
The main campus of the Illinois Institute of Technology is located in Bronzeville, on the South Side of Chicago, Illinois, United States. It is one of five IIT campuses, the others being in the Chicago Loop, the Fulton Market in central Chicago, and the suburbs of Bedford Park and Wheaton. The main campus covers 22 blocks roughly bounded by 30th Street to the north, Michigan Avenue to the east, 35th Street to the south, and the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad tracks to the west. Federal Street, Dearborn Street, State Street, and Wabash Avenue run north–south through the campus. Additionally, 32nd, 33rd, and 34th streets run west–east through the campus. The Chicago "L" has two stations at the campus: the 35th–Bronzeville–IIT station on the Green Line and the Sox–35th station on the Red Line. The Rock Island District's 35th Street station also serves the campus.The main campus includes buildings constructed both by IIT and one of its predecessors, the Armour Institute. The Armour Institute buildings were designed by Patton & Fisher in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, while many of IIT's original buildings were designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in the 1940s and 1950s. Walter Netsch and Myron Goldsmith of Skidmore, Owings, & Merrill took over in the 1960s, each designing multiple buildings, and the local firm of Schmidt, Garden & Erikson designed additional buildings for the IIT Research Institute. Several associated architects were involved in the design, including Holabird & Root, Alschuler & Sincere, and Pace Architects.
The landscaping was done by Alfred Caldwell, a close collaborator of Mies. Caldwell's plan reinforced the design with "landscaping planted in a free-flowing manner, which in its interaction with the pristine qualities of the architecture, introduce a poetic aspect." At 33rd and State streets is a symmetrical fountain designed by Goldsmith, marking the campus's main entrance. There is also a painted rock near Hermann Hall, which was donated to Armour Institute in 1893; it is often used for displaying messages. George Segal's 1986 sculpture Man on a Bench, built for Mies's 100th birthday, stands near Hermann and Perlstein halls.
History
Initial development
The oldest buildings were built for the Armour Institute, a technology school established in 1890 by Philip Danforth Armour and originally headed by Frank W. Gunsaulus. The campus originally consisted of five structures and was centered around Armour Avenue and 33rd Street on the South Side of Chicago, near the Plymouth Mission School, which P. D. Armour had helped found. It initially spanned.The college first used some space in the Armour Flats, which P. D. Armour donated to the college in 1892. It also had space in the Armour Mission Building, built in 1886 at the southeast corner of Federal and 33rd streets. The Armour Institute's first purpose-built building, the Main Building, was financed by a $1.5 million gift from Armour. The college began holding classes in 1893, when the Main Building opened. This building was expanded to the south. Plans for an additional building was announced in 1901, following a gift from Armour's wife; this became Machinery Hall, completed in 1902. The Armour Flats were largely razed in 1918, but parts of that building survived another half-century.
IIT formation and Mies era
By the 1930s, the Armour Institute wished to relocate due to deteriorating quality of life in the neighborhood. The Armour Institute bought land on Lake Michigan, between Ontario and Erie streets in the Streeterville neighborhood of the Near North Side, in 1935. The college planned to spend $2 million on new structures there, while the old South Side campus would have been sold and repurposed. Ultimately, college officials decided to expand the existing campus rather than relocate. The Armour Institute began buying up property around its campus in the late 1930s; they eventually acquired, covering more than 3,000 land lots. The old Armour Mission building was renovated into a student union building in 1938. The Armour Institute agreed in 1939 to merge with another polytechnic college, the Lewis Institute, and IIT was formed the next year when the merger was completed. IIT continued its predecessor's efforts to redevelop and expand the Armour Institute campus.Design
, whose employees included Armour Institute professor John Augur Holabird, started devising plans for the new campus in 1937. Alfred S. Alschuler, a trustee of Armour Institute and later IIT, had been tasked with preparing an alternate plan; although IIT's president Henry Townley Heald did not like the plan, he also did not want to publicly disclose his opinion. Heald privately requested another set of plans from the architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who had been hired in 1938 to lead Armour's school of architecture. After Alschuler died in 1940, Mies was commissioned to design the campus. Heald later said that Mies's selection had been "an act of God", given that the IIT trustees were unaware of Mies's proposal until Alschuler's death. Mies originally worked on the plans with his administrative assistant John Barney Rodgers and his draftsman George Danforth, and he also collaborated with Ludwig Hilberseimer, a coworker he knew from the Bauhaus art school in Germany. The landscape architect Alfred Caldwell began working on the plans as well in 1944.The design of the IIT campus was a large undertaking, comparable to Thomas Jefferson's University of Virginia campus plan, and doubled as a slum clearance project for the area. The new campus's development required clearing several blocks between 32nd and 34th streets, forcing hundreds of families to be relocated. Mies contemplated several alternative campus layouts, including one with curved pathways, before deciding to build his campus on the existing Chicago street grid. Mies's drawings envisioned closing off Dearborn and Federal streets, which ran north–south through the site. The street closures would create superblocks, permitting greater flexibility in the arrangement of these buildings. Most of the structures would have been built on a grid of half-cubes, but the library and administration buildings would have used even larger modules.
The plans originally called for two groups of buildings arranged symmetrically along 33rd Street, with several buildings to be raised on stilts. The drawings were modified after the city refused to allow Dearborn Street to be closed. After several revisions, Mies decided upon a campus of low-rise, flat-roofed buildings, all with steel frames. Mies removed the stilts from the plans to save money, and he decided against including features such as protruding auditoriums and staircases. The final plans called for a group of structures that appeared to be "sliding" past each other, as seen from above. The buildings were to be surrounded by large amounts of green space, as Mies wanted IIT to be a "campus in a park". Though the arrangement of buildings would be asymmetric, the structures themselves would be symmetrical.
1940s construction
In 1941, IIT announced plans to spend $12 million on the new campus. Of the first six structures, two would be administration or humanities buildings, and the other four would be engineering buildings; all would have steel superstructures, glass and brick facades, and open plan interiors. IIT initially sought to raise $3 million. The same year, IIT announced plans for several other buildings serving the institute. The Materials & Minerals Building began construction in 1941 and was completed two years later, becoming both the new campus's first structure and Mies's first U.S. design. The next building, for engineering research, began construction in late 1943 and was finished two years later, being the only other IIT building completed during World War II. The construction of buildings unrelated to the war effort was deprioritized, forcing development of the rest of the campus to be postponed. Wartime steel shortages also prompted changes in several buildings' designs, such as the use of concrete superstructures and custom steel windows. IIT temporarily occupied space at 23 locations across Chicago during the war.IIT's trustees approved a $13.2 million expansion plan in April 1945, which included 16 new buildings on campus. Heald announced that May that the buildings would be constructed when funding became available. The first building developed under this plan, the Navy Building, started construction in July 1945 and was finished by the next year. After the war, many World War II veterans took advantage of the G.I. Bill to enroll in IIT, and the college began constructing two buildings per year to accommodate demand. Heald announced in March 1947 that five dormitory buildings would be built first, to meet the high demand for student housing, and he announced plans for additional housing that November. By the end of the year, four or five structures were under construction, with three additional structures having been completed. In addition, the university finished a temporary athletics building that year.
Initially, most of the new buildings were built north of 33rd Street due to the presence of Mecca Flats south of that point. IIT had acquired Mecca Flats in 1941 with the intention of clearing the site to make way for the new campus, but a judge had prevented the tenants' eviction in 1943. The first modern-style laboratory building, Wishnick Hall, was completed in February 1948, and Skidmore, Owings, & Merrill completed the campus's first dormitories, Farr and Fowler halls, that year. The Association of American Railroads announced plans the same year to construct a research facility on the IIT campus. The AAR facility, between 31st and 32nd streets next to the Rock Island railroad tracks, was to include three buildings. Work on the first AAR building began in 1949, as did construction on a building for the Institute of Gas Technology. The AAR laboratory opened in March 1950. By then, ten buildings had been developed as part of the new campus, including seven by Mies.