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It was many and many a year ago…

… in a kingdom by the sea…

Or make that a city by the lake, and my friend Taraneh, who was taking some courses at the Illinois Institute of Technology, drove me over there. I was stunned.

This was the coldest, ugliest campus ever. The synergy between the flatness of Chicago’s plain, and the plainness of IIT’s flat architecture, was deadly. The place was a morgue, the buildings slabs.

To make matters entirely morbid, it was a dreary winter day. No one around, dark empty sky.

I fled, never to return. Modernism’s one thing, brutalism another.

Now the proposed demolition of this IIT beauty —

— to make way for a public transit stop — has Mies van der Rowe enthusiasts up in arms. Isn’t she lovely? Isn’t she beautiful? Who else could’ve raised those brick shithouse walls like Mies?

Margaret Soltan, May 7, 2009 3:25PM
Posted in: the university

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5 Responses to “It was many and many a year ago…”

  1. Eric the Read Says:

    It’s a classic! They just don’t make brick shithouses like that anymore.

    Seriously, when I read that article this morning, it blew my mind that anyone could possibly think that excrescence was an architectural gem worth preserving against an obviously less ugly Metra station.

  2. Dave Stone Says:

    Ah, good times. College buddy and I once road-tripped to Chicago, and on the way to more enjoyable parts of the city, stopped off to visit his kid brother. Apparently, kid brother’s fraternity pledge class had staged a walk-out (i.e., when the pledges flee the fraternity house after stealing the toilet paper and TV remote control) and decided for reasons unknown to God or man to spend their brief interval of freedom at IIT.

    I’d never seen the IIT before, and was truly appalled, both by the architecture that makes the gulag warm and cozy by comparison, AND that a group of supposedly rational young men would choose a cold and dismal campus in a bleak part of Chicago with a male-female ratio of about 10-1 for their carefree weekend romp.

    Took me a pitcher of Old Style and some deep-dish pizza to recover my equanimity.

  3. RJO Says:

    It’s all a trick. This photo was actually taken in Washington state and it’s the entrance to this place.

  4. theprofessor Says:

    How did Tom Wolfe miss this one?

    Mies probably won an award of some kind for it, too.

  5. Bonzo Says:

    But IIT is coming back, UD.

    http://www.arcspace.com/architects/koolhaas/McCormick-Tribune/

    We visited the place in February, along with U Chicago and Obama’s house. You’ve picked the worst example possible of a Mies piece at IIT.

    Who would want to save it?

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