Mies Building Spotlight
Research Institute (IITRI) Minerals and Metals Research Building
*Addition by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, 1958.
The Minerals and Metals (M&M) Research Buildings is the first Mies-designed structure on Illinois Tech’s campus. His earliest completed work in the United States, the building exploits the advantages of steel, a material more typical of construction in the U.S. than in Germany. Well-suited to the technological needs of the day in general, steel also seemed an appropriate choice for a technical university in particular. Mies constructed the entire frame of the Minerals and Metals Research Building—vertical and horizontal members alike--of wide-flange beams and mullions. The freestanding walls of the building were designed in glass and brick and were inserted within the frame. Indicative of the primacy of structure in the abstract, the wide-flange steel section would later become Mies’ signature element.
That the building occupied a transitional place in Mies’s body of work is apparent on the south end elevation, where columns and spandrels are connected by bolts rather than by welding, which later became standard at Illinois Tech. Nonetheless, the closest thing to its dynamic use of steel in the U.S. was the industrial plant architecture of Albert Kahn. Relative to the vocabulary of buildings at other American technical universities, the Minerals and Metals Research Building qualified as a revolutionary structural effort.
Oddly enough, the columns of the building are not visible at all on the exterior, where a glass wall and a brick apron conceal them. Early sketches suggest that at one point Mies did consider revealing the columns externally but ruled against it, a decision that resulted, unhappily, in cracks in the brick wall at the mullion points. In later Illinois Tech buildings, he exposed the columns on the face of the wall, between brick spandrel panels laid in Flemish bond.
1943 (addition, 1958) Mies van der Rohe, Architect. Holabird & Root, associated architects, George Sollit Construcion Co.
Images courtesy of University Archives and Special Collections, Paul V. Galvin Library, Illinois Institute of Technology
On the building’s interior, the wide flange of the fully constituted frame is most evident. The differentiation of the interior, which houses a three-story foundry hall flanked by three floors of laboratories and offices, was made readable originally on the end wall of the building. There the surface of the metal frame appeared on the brick walls as a geometric pattern. Also externally indicated by the wider fascia at the second-story level was the balcony that overlooks the main floor of the hall. This early display of Mies’s oft-quoted concern for clarity of expression led some observers to speculate that the building’s structural system was derived from the geometric abstractions of the Dutch modernist painter Piet Mondrian, an influence that Mies denied. The truth behind this speculation became academic when the wall was made part of the interior by the 1958 six-bay addition to the north, which maintained the height and width of the first structure but did not continue the space of the foundry hall. Thus, with no need to suggest the presence of a large space, Mies was content to extend the pattern of clerestory windows around the three added elevations, rendered in brick and laid in English bond.
It is worth adding that the Minerals and Metals Research Building was a relatively long, narrow, single-span structure—figured in a typological distinction made by Mies. He saw such buildings as “Gothic” since they were linear systems that could be cut off anywhere along their length. Double-span structures with square bays were regarded as characteristic of the Renaissance, hence, Classical.
This section was derived largely from Franz Schulze, The Campus Guide, Illinois Institute of Technology, An Architectural Tour by Franz Schulze, with Photographs by Richard Barnes, Foreword by Lew Collens (Princeton Press, New York, 2005), pp. 21-23.