What the
El?! Koolhaas Design Is Roaring Success
By Benjamin Forgey
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, November 2, 2003; Page
N01
CHICAGO
The confrontation taking place on State and 33rd streets on
the Near South Side has been eagerly awaited. And now it's
here.
On the one side, the unique campus of the Illinois
Institute of Technology, designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, that
laconic giant of 20th-century architecture, that champion of the
transcendental box, that true believer in the religion of universal
space.
On the other side, a new campus center building by Rem
Koolhaas, that fast-talking, fast-thinking architectural avatar of
the everyday, that radical researcher into topics as basic (and as
ignored) as shopping, that world-traveling salesman of the thought
that tension and discontinuity make up the essence of contemporary
life. And that, by golly, tension and discontinuity deserve
architectural expression!
It seemed a magnificently matched -- or possibly mismatched
-- pair when Koolhaas's selection was announced by IIT after an
international competition five years ago. Fireworks were to be
expected. Rude Koolhaasian aggrandizements vs. Miesian hauteur.
Bad-boy mischief against nerves (and buildings) of steel.
Who knew it was going to be a love fest? Koolhaas knew.
"Mies needs to be protected from his defenders," he wrote. "I do not
respect Mies. I love Mies." So, what we get on Mies's home ground is
a building that offers up affection in the form of revisionist
commentary that is by turns respectful, mischievous and flat-out
contentious.
It all starts, and in some ways ends, with the tube -- a
bold, noise-dampening, steel-encased concrete oval embedded in the
building like the fallen trunk of an enormous, man-made tree. The
530-foot-long tube can be seen, of course, as crushing the Miesian
box underneath -- Koolhaas's building is a big one-story box
sheathed more or less in Miesian materials of metal and glass, and
its roof angles downward from the corners to accommodate the monster
form. As if it were buckling under the pressure. This is funny, one
has to admit: Mies is dead, long live Mies. When I first saw the
image, in photographs, I laughed out loud. And did so again when I
first encountered the tube in real life.
But hold on. The concrete tube sheathed in corrugated metal
(a material that in itself might make Mies turn over in his grave)
is not a smart-aleck, cartoonish, one-off joke. Or, at least, not
only that. It also is a brilliant stratagem conceived to deal with
an impressive real-world problem -- the deafening roar of the
commuter train passing overhead on an elevated track.
Yes, there are more conventional ways to shield a building
from such noise, as Chicago architect Helmut Jahn demonstrated in
his new dormitory directly across the street. (See accompanying
critique.) But elegant, low-key pragmatism is not the Koolhaas way.
As both architect and urbanist he adores the dynamism of the
contemporary city, and he's aware -- resentful, even -- that much
urban infrastructure is often hidden from view. Where he can,
Koolhaas loves to dramatize infrastructure. Here he can. And that's
not all. By incorporating the elevated train literally into the
building (the tube's underside pokes through the ceiling and its
massive black-painted concrete supports parade through the
interior), Koolhaas found a way to enlarge the site. Initially, the
competition brief specified a long, narrow building on one side of
the tracks. But his design makes for a bigger and better box,
accommodating the enlarged list of demands put on today's student
unions. In addition to the expected student services, there are a
handsome faculty restaurant, an information center for visiting
parents, a cafe opening directly to the street, an auditorium, a
ballroom and, coming soon, a 7-Eleven.
Making the building larger by crossing under the railroad
tracks also helped to heal a long-standing wound to the campus. "In
its current form, Mies's IIT is marooned," Koolhaas wrote with
deadpan accuracy. The campus is hemmed in by the Dan Ryan Expressway
to the west and split in half by the elevated trains, with academic
buildings on one side and dormitories on the other. The new campus
center does a lot to mitigate this unhappy condition. In one bold,
highly visible stroke, the Dutch architect dramatized the presence
of the El and, ironically, well nigh erased its negative
impacts.
That's a lot of payoff from a single architectural move.
But enough about the tube. There's lots more, much of it good, some
of it bad and all of it stimulating. There's the color issue, for
instance. The Mies campus could use some. Yet I confess to
ambivalence about the orange glass panels that cover much of the
Koolhaas building's western facade. Color, yes, but fast-food
orange?
There's some redeeming grace to be found up close, however
-- the glass paneling actually is a sandwich filled with a thick
honeycomb-like pattern. From the inside it casts a weirdly
appealing, almost otherworldly glow, and in the afternoon sun, it
creates some genuinely spectacular effects. Whether this is just an
arresting techno-gimmick with momentary appeal or something with a
longer life span is hard to tell -- it's an edge that Koolhaas
clearly likes to totter on.
A favorite Koolhaas gambit is to turn the ordinary into
something highly original, fool's dust into gold, as it were. This
has its ups and downs. It works when it works, as in the Cor-Ten
steel interior walls of his Las Vegas Guggenheim Museum or the
ceiling here of green wallboard with an unfinished look. But when it
bombs it bombs. Witness the lenticular wallpaper Koolhaas chose for
some of the interior surfaces, a material you'd maybe expect to find
in a low-rent neighborhood bar. (A compliment to Koolhaas.) Above
all, take a look at the camouflage pattern on the roofing he uses to
cover most of the north facade -- a slapdash kind of material
painted in dreary browns and blacks that make an ordinary facade
spectacularly awful.
Mies would never do such a thing, and that's probably
Koolhaas's main point -- he's a breaker of cherished rules. This
pattern is a species of applied ornament, just the sort of thing
that modernism once despised. Clearly, Koolhaas isn't afraid to
steal a trick from the postmodernist bag -- this building in a way
is a Koolhaasian take on the "decorated shed" prophesied by
postmodernist guru Robert Venturi. Much better is the supersize
Benday image of Mies affixed to the building's ceremonial entryway.
Not only does it subtly call attention to an otherwise invisible
door, but it does so with genuine wit.
Likewise, the entire interior of the McCormick Tribune
Center is a rebuke to the almost sacred Miesian notion of universal
space. Rather, it is a sophisticated sequence of partitioned rooms,
angled corridors and dramatically defined open spaces. Dirk Lohan,
Mies's grandson and an IIT trustee, points out that Koolhaas was the
only competition finalist to focus on the daily needs of the
students. This was, Lohan says, the decisive factor in the choice of
Koolhaas for the job.
Such attention to human needs may also be the reason
Koolhaas's building contributes so much to Lohan's master plan for
the entire campus. At a low point about 10 years ago, IIT leaders
actually considered moving the institution from its Near South Side
location. But Lohan and others argued convincingly that abandoning
the Mies campus would be a terrible mistake. A plan to revive the
campus, with a new student center as a focal point, ensued.
The spatial outline of the center's interior, Koolhaas told
the selection panel, was based upon observations of the comings and
goings of students as they crossed the vacant lot where the building
was to stand. Hence the strategically placed doors and the many
engaging diagonals in the floor plan. There are a few right angles
here, mostly for subsidiary functions, but they are carefully tucked
away. One's predominant experience of the space is that of constant
movement -- first of the eyes, then of the feet, for this is a
building tailor-made for exploration.
The interior is replete with uniquely Koolhaasian touches,
such as a long, burrowed, red-painted computer alcove or the
seemingly unusable area underneath the "collapsing" roof. "We're all
waiting to see how the students will put this area to use," comments
Donna Robertson, IIT's architecture dean. At the time of my visits,
they already had spread out artworks on the tilting floor. A
delightful surprise is the plethora of apparently leftover nooks and
crannies that, supplied with benches and chairs, actually turn out
to be splendid places to study or relax. (Noise levels, however, are
high throughout the public spaces.)
Affectionate commentaries on Mies abound. On one side of
the faculty restaurant, for instance, there is a partitioned
one-table dining room whose glass walls, reflecting a shallow,
rock-filled pool, recall the magic that Mies masterfully wrought in
his German Pavilion at the 1929 Barcelona World's Fair. Then there
is the transparent wall that gives you a close-up view of the
exterior walls of an adjacent Mies building -- a poignantly
respectful view, focusing on one of those famously detailed Mies
corners in black-painted steel.
With its sheen of up-to-the-minute materials, the Koolhaas
interior is fashionable to a fare-thee-well. And though some might
find this a fault, the materials for the most part contribute
significantly to the building's spatial and psychological dynamism.
The key is the wonderfully sophisticated floor plan, a skeleton that
Koolhaas fills out with engaging aplomb. The vivacity and
intellectual sparkle of the design make you forgive this building's
faults. Along with the fabulous tube, the interior elevates the
McCormick Tribune Center to a status far above the norm.
That is as it should be, of course, in an environment
dominated by the spirit and the fact of a great architect like Mies.
In ways at once playful, aggressive, foolhardy and yet fundamentally
respectful, Koolhaas challenged the Miesian status quo. That is as
it should be, as well, for nothing stands still.
© 2003 The Washington Post
Company
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The McCormick Tribune Campus Center at the Illinois
Institute of Technology, designed by Rem Koolhaas, with an
image of Mies Van Der Rohe incorporated into the building.
(Richard Barnes - Courtesy Illinois
Institute of Technology)
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