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REM KUOLHAAS"S STUDENT CENTER AT THE ILLINOIS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY SHOWS ADMIRATION FOR THE UNIUERSITY"S PATRON SAINT, MIES VAN DER ROHE, BUT NO RESPECT.
In the nineteenth century, architects freely roamed the urban landscape of Chicago. Today, Frank Lloyd Wright, Louis Sullivan, and John Wellborn Root are gods, their crumbling temples guarded by tweed-robed preservationists. Thousands of buildings-even whole neighborhoods-have been landmarked or listed. The design guidelines that inevitably accompany such designations encourage imitation rather than innovation, as though contemporary architects can't be trusted to do the right thing. So, in the past two decades, prairie-style libraries, beaux-arts parks, and art deco skyscrapers have risen in the city, with little or no irony to redeem them.
Thankfully, this year may mark a turning point for Chicago architecture. Several practitioners of note are working on, or have completed, projects that offer progressive solutions to the challenge of designing in a historical context, from the renovation and expansion of the neoclassical Soldier Field by Wood + Zapata and Lohan Caprile Goettsch to a new University of Chicago businessschool building designed by Rafael Vinoly for a site across the street from Wright's Robie House. The most fascinating and complex solution arrived in September, when the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) opened its McCormick Tribune Campus Center, designed by Rem Koolhaas. In much the same way that Italian mannerists played with the standards established by their Renaissance predecessors, Koolhaas toys with the fundamentals of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's architecture-knowingly, carefully, and, best of all, irreverently. "I do not respect Mies," Koolhaas maintains. "I love Mies."
MEETING OF THE MINDS
A block-wide strip of parking bisected by an elevated commuter train line separates the core of the IIT academic campus-where Mies conducted his radical experiments in steel-frame construction and open planning during the 1940s and 1950s-from a group of slightly later, Mies-inspired dormitories to the east. According to Donna Robertson, dean of IIT's architecture school and champion of the campus-center project, what initially distinguished Koolhaas's competition-winning scheme in the minds of the jury was his proposal to wrap the noisy elevated train in a corrugatedmetal tube and to squeeze the roof of the campus center under it...