Crown Hall dazzles in Mies simplicity

Chicago Tribune — The renovation of Crown Hall, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's masterpiece at the Illinois Institute of Technology, will be celebrated with a splashy gala Thursday night—and the result truly is worth celebrating, not only because it looks so good but also because it tells us so much about Mies that we didn't know before.

To come upon the freshly renovated pavilion, with its original steel frame painted crisp "Mies black" and its new panes of glass dazzlingly clear, is to step back in time to a simpler America, of Davy Crockett coonskin caps and Levittown Cape Cods, where a building like this would have seemed utterly revolutionary. To see it is to see Mies as the daring figure he truly was, not the cigar-smoking demigod who built gray flannel-suit architecture for the Establishment.

Carried out by Mark Sexton of Krueck & Sexton Architects and consultant Gunny Harboe of McClier, the three-month, $3.6 million project is a triumph of historic preservation, one that underscores the need to save some of the very midcentury modernist landmarks that postmodernists unfairly maligned a generation ago. Chicago's Stanley Tigerman even created a photo collage, "The Titanic," which showed a listing Crown Hall sinking into the sea.

Located at 3360 S. State St. and home to IIT's College of Architecture since its opening in 1956, Crown Hall has weathered such foolish bashing and gone on to become a National Historic Landmark and an official Chicago landmark. It is the high church of "less is more," as perfectly proportioned as a symmetrical Greek temple, but far more skeletal, like the French Gothic cathedrals whose flying buttresses opened the way for diaphanous walls of richly colored stained-glass.

Even this Notre Dame of High Modernism needs TLC from time to time, however, which put Sexton and Harboe in a tricky position: Modern building codes called for thicker windows and stronger window frames than those Mies used. But if the architects changed the look of the Crown Hall one iota, they'd set off an international firestorm. Some old hands at IIT, who worked with Mies, publicly questioned details of the renovation.

Yet now that the project is complete, it's clear that the architects have achieved the right balance between bringing Crown Hall into the 21st Century and restoring its mid-20th Century aesthetic—and thus bringing to life the ideas Mies and his building so brilliantly conveyed.

A dazzling object

The renovated Crown Hall is, first and foremost, a dazzling aesthetic object, and not simply because its fresh coat of heavy-duty industrial paint (a brand called Tnemec, cement spelled backward) makes it stand out like a man in a black tuxedo against the blue August sky.

The building's new sheathing—big upper-level windows and, beneath them, smaller pairs of translucent windows with a sandblasted inner layer—correctly restores Crown's transparency, an essential part of what Mies, in his mystical High Lama way, called the architecture of "almost nothing."

The upper windows are thicker than their predecessors, but they do not look green, as thick windows are wont to do, because they are made of special low-iron glass. And instead of resembling shiny plastic panels, as the lower windows did after a mid-1970s renovation by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, the new ones suggest Japanese shoji screens, working in sync with the big sheets of glass above them. As Sexton correctly observes: "The building is a unified whole. Before it looked like glass and plastic."

Combine this new openness with the new crisp outlines of the steel frame, previously a dull gray, and you have a stunning combination of skin and bone, void and solid. It must have blown away people in the 1950s who still thought of buildings as masses of masonry, not prisms of steel and glass.

Because of the renovation, Crown Hall no longer seems standoffishly insular. It is a welcome shock to walk by and see the ghostly outline of a construction worker behind one of the new lower walls. This is not the isolated "object building" criticized by the postmodernists. It is subtly, but unmistakably, a part of the city.

Surprises inside

Inside are more pleasant surprises, from the buffed black terrazzo floor to the spray-painted white ceiling tiles (nicely cleaned up from the mess they were before). What they add up to is a space of transcendent calm, at least until the next round of architecture students starts piling up mounds of drawings and models.

The newly sharp view out the big upper windows reveals the surrounding trees of Mies' landscape architect Alfred Caldwell. Their organic, sinuous outlines create a poetic contrast with the machinelike, right-angled quality of the architecture. Again, you see that this is not a building in a vacuum. Mies' designs invariably were site-specific. They just didn't imitate everything around them, as the postmodernists did.

But the most welcome change comes in the softly diffused light admitted by the lower windows.

Skidmore's renovation used laminated glass, which made these windows too reflective, like mirrors. Their replacements are far more translucent. You can look through them and see inklings of the greenness of the grass and the blueness of the sky. It is an Arctic spectrum of different shades of white—a very narrow spectrum compared to the hot orange walls of Rem Koolhaas' IIT campus center, but a spectrum of icy beauty nonetheless.

And what of the most controversial detail of the renovation, the thin metal frames, or stops, that prevent the upper windows from falling out?

In a marked departure from Mies' incessantly right-angled architecture, Sexton designed these replacement parts with a teeny diagonal. They are 5/8 of an inch thick on the outside (to maintain the proportions of the original) and 3/4 of an inch thick on the inside (to provide enough "bite" to meet modern building codes).

This custom-designed detail didn't sit well with old hands at IIT who argued it departed from Mies' philosophy of using materials off-the-shelf or straight out of the factory. As if to support their point, the renovation's glossy new paint makes visible the stamps of the companies that made Crown Hall's steel, Bethlehem Steel and U.S. Steel.

Visual purity

But if there is certain philosophical impurity to the new stops, they do nothing to impinge upon Crown Hall's visual purity. Besides, Mies himself could be far more flexible than his disciples. He demonstrated that most memorably in the 860 and 880 North Lake Shore Drive apartment buildings (featured in today's Tribune magazine), where he abandoned rigid rationalism for the subjective step of attaching decorative I-beams to the facades. Why did he do that? Without the I-beams, he said, the buildings simply "did not look right."

A genuine problem at Crown Hall, as Sexton acknowledges, are the garishly white vertical bands of fabric that hold together Crown Hall's new window blinds. They stick out like extra-fat pinstripes on a dark suit. They need a lot of yellowing from the sun so they can fade into the background. Fortunately, as Sexton notes, they will be removed in the next phase of Crown Hall's renovation, which calls for the building to be made more "green," or energy-efficient.

Despite that fault, the renovation of Crown Hall is a major success, one that represents the latest step forward for IIT's once-forlorn urban campus. But the ramifications of what has been done extend far beyond the South Side. They remind us why Mies was the great figure he was—he was both poet and pragmatist, bold in his art yet sensitive to his surroundings. He was the most influential architect of the 20th Century yet only now, at the beginning of the 21st, can we see his vision with the full clarity it deserves.

About Illinois Institute of Technology

Illinois Institute of Technology, also known as Illinois Tech, is a private, technology-focused, research university offering undergraduate and graduate degrees in engineering, science, architecture, business, design, human sciences, applied technology, and law. One of 16 institutions that comprise the Association of Independent Technological Universities (AITU), Illinois Tech offers exceptional preparation for professions that require technological sophistication, an innovative mindset, and an entrepreneurial spirit.