The road to Crown Hall was a long battle. Mies's original 1940 campus plan was centered by two major showcase buildings, a student union, and a library with large exposed trusses on its roof, placed on either side of 33rd street. However, money remained tight, and the first new structures on campus, such as the 1941 Metals and Mineral Research building, were smaller, and deceptively simple.
Crown Hall was to be much more ambitious and daring than the campus's earlier building, and Mies had to overcome initial resistance from school trustees, who thought it too expensive. When that obstacle was overcome, there were the city building inspectors. According to former Mies student and current IIT professor David Sharpe, they told Mies he “couldn't build it as a classroom building, because the (steel) columns would have to be fireproofed” with sprayed-on concrete. “Mies didn't want to put concrete on these . . . (so) they said we could build it this way if we classified it as a warehouse. But then the city said, well, if you're going to have to do that, you're going to have to sprinkler it. This was the first sprinklered building on campus”
Sharpe spoke at an IIT symposium that brought together George Danforth, one of Mies's first associates in Chicago and the man who succeeded him as Dean of the School of Architecture in 1958, Dever Rockwell, Danforth's former architectural partner, and IIT professors David Sharpe, Peter Roesch and George Schipporeit - all former students of Mies.
At the symposium, Roesch talked of the next obstacle, a construction fire that took place before the metal work was put up. "Where we're sitting now collapsed, after an hour of the form work burning underneath, and there was a delay. It was in the winter, when they had to heat the forms so the concrete didn't freeze."
Mies had designed the stairs so they would be uncluttered by handrails, but it was not to be “It looked beautiful without handrails," remembers Roesch, but “the building inspector came and said, well, this is not a warehouse, you're using it as a school. Mies . . . really was so upset by that, that he had to put these rails up." Today those handrails are famous for their minimalist elegance.
Crown Hall was finally completed in 1956. It would be where Mies would exorcise his dual obsessions: maximum transparency, and the largest possible building, achieved through the minimum possible structure. “You walk in there,” says Gunny Harboe of Austin AECOM, preservation architect for the restoration “and it really makes your jaw drop.” Mies created a "“magnificent one-room schoolhouse,"” in the words of IIT Dean of Architecture Donna Robertson - a single room, 120 feet wide by 220 feet long and 18 feet high, whose roof is suspended from four enormous plate girders, allowing the interior to be completely free of columns, an unobstructed 26,000 square feet, over half a football field. The floor is gray terrazzo, the aggregate a composite of Virginia and Tennessee marbles, set on a 2 1/2 by 5 foot grid, . The ceiling is made up of foot-square white acoustic tile, separated from the outer walls by a one foot recessed soffit that makes the ceiling appear to float in one continuous sweep. Along the building's perimeter, structure has been pared down to an ultra-light steel frame for an infill made completely of glass. Each of the ultra-clear upper panes is a spectacular 11 1/2 by 9 1/2 feet. The combined weight of all the building's glass is over 22 tons. "What Mies did" says Mark Sexton, project architect along with his partner, Ron Krueck, of Krueck and Sexton " is that he not only made it structurally, incredibly efficient . . . but he also made it incredibly beautiful. He blended structure and architecture in a perfect balance, almost like a tree or a leaf."
"Almost nothing," at long last. "Through the use of almost nothing," says Robertson, "(Mies) creates an almost sacred space." "It's a puff of air," is how Alfred Caldwell, another legendary Mies colleague, admiringly described Crown Hall, remembers associate dean Peter Beltemacchi. "That's everything in architecture," Beltemacchi adds. Everything fits together perfectly, with simplicity and grace. The result is a communal space that eloquently expresses the idea of freedom within order.
