IIT Campus Tour: Mies and More

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IIT Campus Tour: Mies and More

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Bill Zbaren

Mies van der Rohe’s S.R. Crown Hall and the Illinois Institute of Technology are icons of the Modern movement. Yet in order to realize Mies’ campus master plan, IIT displaced and demolished a large swath of the surrounding Bronzeville neighborhood – including the Mecca Flats apartment building, whose African American residents fought for 12 years to preserve their community. This tour will explore the history of the campus and several of its architectural masterpieces, and explore ways that IIT is working to acknowledge and contextualize its complex past. The tour will conclude with a live Q&A.

Tour leader: Michelangelo Sabatino

Duration: 1 hour with live component and Q&A 

Michelangelo Sabatino

Michelangelo Sabatino trained as an architect, preservationist, and historian. As an educator, academic leader, and award-winning scholar, Sabatino contributes to shaping architectural discourse and practice in the Americas and beyond. Between 2017–19 Professor Sabatino served as interim dean for the College of Architecture of the Illinois Institute of Technology. He currently directs the PhD program in architecture and is the inaugural John Vinci Distinguished Research Fellow. Sabatino’s book Pride in Modesty: Modernist Architecture and the Vernacular Tradition in Italy (2011) won multiple awards, including the Society of Architectural Historians’ Alice Davis Hitchcock Award. His recent books include Avant-Garde in the Cornfields: Architecture, Landscape, and Preservation in New Harmony (with Ben Nicholson, 2019), Making Houston Modern: The Life and Architecture of Howard Barnstone (with Barrie Scardino Bradley and Stephen Fox, 2020), Modern in the Middle: Chicago Houses 1929–1975 (with Susan Benjamin, 2020) and Carlo Mollino: Architect and Storyteller (with Napoleone Ferrari, 2021).

www.michelangelo-sabatino.com 

Upcoming Tours

Brutalism and Field Theory at UIC

The University of Illinois at Chicago Circle was created between 1963 and 1968 as an “instant campus” in response to major growth in college enrollment following WWII.  Its Brutalist design by Walter Netsch and SOM became a nationally recognized model for other campuses across the country, even as it displaced thousands of neighborhood residents and sparked local grassroots protests. This tour will include virtual visits to the buildings and spaces at UIC that have delighted and frustrated users since the day they opened. The tour will conclude with a live Q&A.

Three Modern Houses in the Chicagoland Suburbs

This tour offers a study in contrasts at three remarkable houses in the Chicagoland suburbs. Architect Paul Schweikher designed his own House & Studio in 1938 as a sophisticated fusion of organic modernism and Japanese influences. The Ford House, designed in 1949 by Bruce Goff, is built of coal, glass, cedar, hemp, and pieces of a Quonset hut.  The McCormick House, built in 1952, is one of only three single-family houses designed by Mies van der Rohe in the US. Join the stewards of these houses for an up-close and personal view of what it means to live and work in these Modernist gems. The tour will include virtual visits inside each house and conclude with a live Q&A.

The Thompson Center: Populist Postmodernism

The “Postmodernist People’s Palace” has been controversial since it opened in 1985. Helmut Jahn’s glassy spaceship was designed to reference the dome of the state capitol and to symbolize government openness and transparency.  The building’s dizzying circular atrium (described as “a place some people love to hate”) is simultaneously an icon of the Postmodernist architectural movement and a visible reminder of the effects of deferred maintenance.

Due to the pandemic and the planned sale of the building, a full tour experience of the Thompson Center was not possible. This event will combine presentations and visual media that explore the political, cultural, and technological history of the James R. Thompson Center – and address ongoing threats to the building’s preservation. The event will conclude with a live Q&A.

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