On the Importance of Design Maintenance

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On the Importance of Design Maintenance.

Buildings represent a major investment for any institution. Often, in order to present a better face and draw students, Institutions will turn to designers and architects to create a unique and functional space that ties in with their goals as a school. The Illinois Institute of Technology did this in the early decades of the 20th century by hiring and committing to the then-recently-immigrated German architect, Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe.

Mies was hired at the dawn of the university, as it transitioned from a merger between Armour Institute and Lewis Institute into its current namesake. It was determined that Armour’s old campus would not be large enough to sustain its vision of the future, and purchased 113 acres around the Armour Institute’s original 7 acres in Chicago’s Bronzeville District. As head of the architecture department on campus, Mies and his firm were given exclusive rights to design a campus master plan and the buildings within.

Mies by this time had already established himself prominently as a designer in Germany, and is often called the father of Modernism. Having established and developed his design principles in Germany at the Bauhaus (another design school he was president of briefly before emigrating), he set to work using IIT as a laboratory to refine his principles to their extreme conclusion. His classrooms, laboratories, chapel, and residences have proven to be an exemplary testament to the International style he helped create. Even though Mies left the University in 1959, his tradition continued in most of the buildings put up after he was gone. Firms like Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill explored further Mies’ ideals of Modernism and the “less is more” aesthetic. In 2005, the campus was added to the National Register of Historic Places, and has been consistently recognized as one of the 200 most significant works of architecture in the United States. All of this historic design work is a major draw both for potential students and tourists from all over the world. However, it also bears with it a major responsibility to maintain the historic nature of the campus. Over the years, IIT has had numerous successes and failures in preservation and design as it has tried to respond to the constantly changing needs of its student body while keeping its role as guardian to the Mies legacy, and serves as a great example of the potential bonuses and pitfalls of sticking with a designer’s ideas for long after the architect would normally no longer be involved and others ideas move in.


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