McCormick Tribune Campus Center

“I do not respect Mies. I love Mies. I studied Mies, dug up Mies, reassembled Mies. I even cleaned Mies. And because I do not hold Mies in esteem, I am in conflict with his admirers.”
“According to statistics, a student and his or her parents decide within five seconds of arriving whether to apply to a particular university or not. With this assessment, the IIT campus has a problem with Mies van der Rohe. It is a masterwork that remains invisible to the contemporary eye. Mies's work has undoubtedly become overlooked.”

The McCormick Tribune Campus Center is the first realized building by OMA in the USA. Koolhaas's team was tasked with creating an architectural bypass in the very heart of the IIT university campus, which was developed under the supervision of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in the 1940s and 1950s. Mies's spirit is still felt here today. He established the architecture department at IIT, which he then led for twenty years. The balanced composition of volumes is a similar urban manifesto as the Stuttgart Weissenhofsiedlung from the 1920s, where Mies also outlined urbanism and realized its largest part. However, sterile late functionalism did not endear itself to Chicago. The loosely built campus is surrounded by an eight-lane highway and intersects with a railway line. Since Mies's time, the popularity of the school has decreased, and the total number of students has halved.
In 1995, IIT commissioned Dirk Lohan, Mies van der Rohe’s grandson, to try to address the structural and spatial deficit of the campus. The new urban plan considered, in addition to landscaping interventions and the reconstruction of historical buildings, also new constructions on the IIT campus after more than thirty years. In 1998, a competition was held for the campus center, where among the finalists were Peter Eisenman, Helmut Jahn, Zaha Hadid, Kazuyo Sejima, and Rem Koolhaas. OMA's victory might have been a shock for some. Koolhaas's projects have often been accompanied by paraphrases, irony, and criticism of Mies's work throughout history, and now he had the opportunity to build in the heart of Mies's largest realization.
Koolhaas himself adds to the project: “The railway had a huge impact on the character of IIT: as a declaration of a new beginning, we enclosed a section of the track in an acoustically insulating stainless steel tube in the middle of the campus, which released the potential of the surrounding land and created a crucial piece of the IIT image.
How to inhabit the area with only half the population compared to the 1970s? This riddle suggested to us how to create a building capable of reurbanizing the largest possible area with the least amount of building material. Moreover, the situation of the Illinois Institute of Technology is exacerbated by no man's land on both sides of the elevated railway.
The physical project at the heart of the campus is our project. The accumulation of activities, the seating of each part of the program as part of a dense mosaic, our building creates an urban environment within itself.
The network of lines connecting the east of the campus with the west captures the flows of students, organizes the campus center, and divides it without fragmenting the overall building. Each part is sectioned according to its specific needs and positioned to create districts (24-hour, commercial, entertainment, academic, utilitarian), parks, and other miniatures of urban elements.
The main common element is the roof, a continuous concrete slab that protects the center from the noise of the elevated railway and unifies the heterogeneity beneath it.”

Some of the photographs were taken with the kind permission of Falke Bruinsma. You can view the remaining photos on the site photos.innersource.com