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Totally Tubular Koolhaas | |
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Shopping Japanese Style | |
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Conceptually In Between | |
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Totally Tubular Koolhaas Crossing Paths The site for the campus center was long considered unbuildable. Although close to the geographic center of IIT's 120-acre (50-hectare) campus on Chicago's Near South Side, and not far from the architecture school's Crown Hall, the site was skewered by one of Chicago's elevated train lines. The campus was designed by Mies van der Rohe. In 1938, he had been invited to become head of IIT's architecture program after the closure of the Bauhaus, of which he had been the director. His precise rectilinear layout for IIT and the black-painted steel and buff-brick buildings became the ultimate Miesian environment — a single-minded vision of architecture and technology joined in the service of education. Mies's buildings appear almost machine-made, as if the product of some gigantic extrusion device. Koohaas's campus center, in contrast, revels in this environment yet establishes its own identity on a campus where it is hard to tell one building from another. The program includes a welcome center, dining facilities, campus radio station, auditorium and meeting rooms, university bookstore, coffee bar, convenience store, post office, and student activity offices. The one-story, 100,000-square-foot (9,300-square-meter) building occupies a site on State Street, just north of 33rd Street. The site had been open, crisscrossed with shortcut paths between the student dormitories and the main classroom buildings. Koolhaas used those paths to diagram the building, preserving the shortcuts. The paths are on a diagonal to the north-south orthogonal orientation of the building, which follows Mies's campus plan. The result is roughly pie-shaped wedges of program space (Koolhaas describes them as "neighborhoods") each dedicated to a general function — 24-hour use, commercial, entertainment, academic, utilitarian. Welcoming Inside The building becomes a miniature city, and the pathways become its boulevards, off of which Koolhaas inserted public spaces. These include ramp seating where students can hang out and meet, a two-story sunken center court recreation and dining area overlooked by built-in bleachers and stairs (similar to the Prada store interior), and a "broadband" channel of space with access to computer stations. Throughout the building is a sprinkling of history. At the main entrance to the west is a 25-foot- (7.6-meter-) tall mural of Mies' face, welcoming building users but also looking a bit gruffly at his own creation across State Street. Inside the new building at the welcome center is a long glass wall displaying the portraits of several IIT founders (including a younger Mies). The images are actually pixilated compositions of human symbols for student activities that one finds throughout the building. The images are the creation of 2x4, a graphic design studio in New York that worked with OMA and designed other decorative features, such as the large digital clock near the entrance and embedded floor maps. Other elements recalling the school's architectural history are the black-painted "I-beam" columns used throughout the interior (another nod to Mies). Koolhaas actually puts the master's IIT architecture on display. The campus center incorporates the existing Commons Building, where dining areas are located. Koolhaas bends his building around Commons, transforming the older structure into a set piece that one can admire from the "Mies Bridge" near the campus center's entrance. A Train Runs through It Marching through the center of Koohaas's building are slanted concrete pylons that disappear through the ceiling. These muscular structural elements are a hint of what really makes the new campus center possible, for the entire building is constructed just under the elevated train line. >>> Discuss this article in the Architecture Forum...
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