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Mies without marble can be dry and sere. No matter how much Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's design for the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago exemplifies the highest and purest Modernism, 50 years after its construction (1945-68), the steel-and-concrete structures with brick-and-glass curtain walls look very quiet, almost lifeless.
The McCormick Tribune Campus Center has altered the gestalt in one brash, bold blow. Designed by Rem Koolhaas and his Rotterdam-based Office of Metropolitan Architecture in association with the venerable Chicago firm of Holabird & Root, the exterior form looks almost like a one-story Miesian glass rectangle squeezed under--and deformed by--a 530-foot-long stainless-steel tube that stretches the length of its roof. Inside, diagonal circulation paths overlay a Miesian orthogonal plan, giving it a spatial dynamism. That vitality is bolstered by a slippery fusion of surface with section, where the ground level slides into a lower level, and spaces between ceilings and floors are compressed and expanded as you walk through the building.
Moreover, slickly gleaming planes for floors, walls, and counters add dramatic surface effects to the spatial ones. To counter these seductions, Koolhaas jolts the Center with juxtapositions of jarring colors and with slapdash insertions of rough-tech concrete or gypsum board on the exterior and interior surfaces.
Aiming for the polymorphically perverse rather than the platonically perfect, Koolhaas mines architecture's potential for elegance and beauty, and then, sneering at its temptations, pushes it toward the subversive kitsch seen in the art of Jeff Koons or Damien Hurst or the purposeful frumpiness in the fashion design of Miuccia Prada or Helmut Lang.
The location for the 110,000-square-foot Center couldn't be worse--where the elevated Chicago Transit Authority train track divides the academic campus from the residential one. Koolhaas says he figured that the best way to buffer the train's rumbles was to wrap the tracks in an elliptically shaped tube, the lower half of which is concrete encased in corrugated stainless steel, and the rest stainless steel. Then he wedged the $34.6 million rectilinear structure underneath the $13.6 million tube on its 5-acre site adjoining Mies's Commons. The buffer idea does work: Outside the building, the noise of the trains passing frequently above is 120 decibels, while inside it is cut down to 70 decibels....