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The architecture students working in Mies van der Rohe's 1956 Crown Hall in Chicago are overheating. Amanda Birch reports on two engineers' plans to use new and old technologies to cool them off and keep the Mies police at bay
When Ludwig Mies van der Rohe was musing over the design of his modernist masterpiece, the Crown Hall in Chicago, it is unlikely that he agonised over its energy efficiency.
The Illinois Institute of Technology's school for architecture, planning and design was designed and built at a time when words such as sustainability and global warming hadn't yet become everyday parlance.
His seminal work contains a vast uninterrupted 36.6 x 67m and 5.5m high column-free fully glazed space which is raised from the ground to provide natural ventilation and daylight into the semi- subterranean floor below.
Mies said at the time of its completion in 1956, that Crown Hall was to remain, "the clearest structure we have done, the best to express our philosophy".
So it was with some trepidation and curiosity that Patrick Bellew, founding director of environmental engineer Atelier Ten, and Matthias Schuler, managing director of Transsolar the Stuttgart- based climate engineer, began their analysis of the environmental condition of this iconic structure.
The engineers produced a report, The Greening of Crown Hall, following a three-month investigation into why the building had become so uncomfortable - too hot both in summer and winter, with unwelcome draughts. They also recommended measures to reduce its high-energy consumption and improve its environmental performance.
This was a tough challenge. Crown Hall is no ordinary building. It is one of the youngest buildings on the American National Register of Historic Places (equivalent to a grade 1 listing). The engineers also had to contend with a very powerful historical body, fondly nicknamed "The Mies Police", which fiercely guards against any alterations, however slight, to his buildings.
"We were told from the beginning that there was a list of things we couldn't do," says Bellew. "Initially, our brief wasn't to green it, that came later. Our key brief was to look at how we could make this building more comfortable to be in without resorting to fully air-conditioning it throughout the year."
Sealing off the building by shutting all...