Proud is the campus that wears a crown

Chicago Sun-Times—Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's South Side campus for Illinois Institute of Technology is wearing a gleaming new crown—or, rather, an old one that now shines like new.

S.R. Crown Hall, the great Chicago architect's modernist masterwork of 1956—numbered among the greatest buildings in the world last year by Time magazine—has completed the second and most visually conspicuous phase of an ongoing renovation designed to bring it back to mint condition.

On paper, this $3.6 million phase hadn't seemed destined to produce an especially noticeable effect; its main features, after all, were seemingly simple matters of replacing the glass and repainting the steel beams of the curtain wall. But viewed in the light of day during a media preview on Thursday, the results were downright eye-popping.

The chief feature of Crown Hall's stunning new look is the fact that the vertical steel members of the facade, which had been sun-bleached to an almost ghostly gray in recent years, are now aggressively, unapologetically black, emphasizing the blunt severity of the building's exposed grid. A building that had seemed solemnly retiring, even funereal, now announces itself with an in-your-face vitality that's positively bracing.

The new paint "still feels a little black, a little graphic to us," said Donna Robertson, dean of IIT's School of Architecture, which Crown Hall houses. "In a year or so, it'll fade a bit to a deep charcoal black, which was Mies' favorite."

Let's hope it doesn't fade too much. In an unexpected way, this newly pumped-up muscularity of color reveals, punctuates, supports and complements the glass more powerfully than before, making the building's south face seem even more transparent and floating. In the process of becoming more emphatic, Crown Hall has somehow also grown more ethereal, its still-here quality paradoxically reinforcing the impression of its being almost-not-there.

There's a good deal more to the Crown Hall face-lift, which has been painstakingly supervised by Mark Sexton, an IIT graduate and a principal with the Chicago firm Krueck & Sexton Architects. The lower glass panels, which had been installed in a 1974 renovation, have been replaced with thicker, sandblasted windows, which are both more translucent and create fewer interior reflections. The upper-level louvers have been refurbished and the ceiling freshly painted white. The interior stops have been repaired and repainted, their prominent screws replaced.

Everything has been done with almost excruciating attention to detail, in part because a number of true believers from the modernist tradition (a k a the "Mies police") have watched the renovation like hawks.

This vigilance is only appropriate, of course, for the centerpiece of the campus that Mies designed, and where he led the College of Architecture for two decades ending in 1958. You can't go too far to preserve a building that has inspired several generations of architects, many of whom make pilgrimages to it from all over the world.

Besides, in a building this breathtakingly spartan, even the tiniest details—such as stop screws that were rejected because they were one-thirty-second of an inch off the mark—stand out.

"What Mies did was so structurally efficient and so incredibly beautiful," Sexton said. "He blended structure and architecture into a perfect balance, like a tree or a leaf. If something is a little mismatched, a little off, you know it immediately because there's so little of it."

The building opens officially to the public from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Aug. 27 with "Crowning Around," a day of free festivities (including music, tours, food and more) celebrating the restoration, after which students will be back at their Mies-designed desks, learning his art.

IIT soon will begin the third and last phase of the renovation, during which Crown Hall's technical and energy systems will be upgraded and made even more efficient. Until then, it's time to marvel.

"I was really moved and surprised when I saw what they've done," says Justine Jentes, director of the Mies van der Rohe Society, a group dedicated to preserving the architect's legacy at IIT. "I didn't believe it would make this much of a difference, but it looks like a new building."

Founded in 1890, IIT is a Ph.D.-granting technological university awarding degrees in the sciences, mathematics and engineering, as well as architecture, psychology, design, business and law. IIT’s interprofessional, technology-focused curriculum prepares the university’s 6,200 students for leadership roles in an increasingly complex and culturally diverse global workplace.