Mies van der Rohe's workhorse tower gets a vibrant remake as a dorm at Chicago's Illinois Institute of Technology
CHICAGO — The pandemic. The unrest that followed the killing of George Floyd. Rampant looting in downtown Chicago. Against that chaotic backdrop, it was moving earlier this week to experience the profound calm that characterizes the architecture of master modernist Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.
On the first floor of a newly renovated building at the Illinois Institute of Technology, the campus on Chicago’s South Side that bears Mies’ unmistakable imprint, floor-to-ceiling glass framed a serene view of honey locust and hawthorn trees. The looting that had ransacked downtown stores earlier that morning seemed far away.
The building I was touring was not S.R. Crown Hall, the clear-span, steel-and-glass masterwork that’s home to IIT’s architecture school. It was, instead, George J. Kacek Hall, a workhorse nine-story building that Mies designed in the mid-1950s as faculty, staff and married student housing and that Chicago architect Dirk Denison has creatively converted into an undergraduate dorm.
Kacek Hall’s concrete and brick exterior is squat, lacking the perfect proportions and elegant refinements of Mies’ iconic, steel-and-glass high-rises at 860 and 880 North Lake Shore Drive. But it speaks with an honest, sometimes stirring, voice.
