The Restoration of Campus Landscape
Image courtesy of Hoerr Schaudt
The Illinois Institute of Technology landscape has a history of its own, dating back to the earliest days of Armour Institute, but as with so much of the school’s building program, Mies van der Rohe’s tenure figures heavily in the development of the grounds as they present themselves today. During World War II, Mies struck up a relationship with Chicago landscape architect Alfred Caldwell, in whom he reposed sufficient confidence to invite him to redesign the campus landscape. He also appointed him to the faculty of the department of architecture, and in the course of the 1940s and 1950s, Caldwell left his imprint on the campus. Nearly everything he achieved is apparent today but largely on account of the restorative efforts of later designers; over the years many plantings were lost, and in 1999 Illinois Tech undertook a landscape master plan in order to recreate Caldwell’s work and enhance it appropriately.
The process began with the hiring of the landscape architect Michael van Valkenburgh of Cambridge, Massachusetts, in a supervisory capacity. Some of what has been accomplished is traceable to his concepts, but most has been carried out by his successor, Peter Lindsay Schaudt of Chicago. The new landscape followed the avowed intention of the master plan to leave the viewer with a perceptible sense of a “campus in a park.” This meant drawing attention to the local greenery and adding to it, while de-emphasizing all that interfered with it - most notably, the automobile. The parkways on State Street between Thirty-first and Thirty-fifth streets were widened and the street itself narrowed, with curbside parking eliminated. The decision to plant more than 350 trees on the median as well as on both the east and west parkways was inspired by a small stand of honey locusts that had been left by Caldwell directly east of Crown Hall.
Schaudt’s team has given most of the remainder of its energy to the landscape west of State Street, especially north of Crown Hall. There approximately seventy-five trees have been planted, and students of landscape architecture can easily recognize that they are native to the area , a sign of Schaudt’s faithfulness to Caldwell and of Caldwell’s allegiance to the prairie school of landscape architecture, specifically its leading practitioner, Jens Jensen. The species of the trees bear out these relationships; native honey locust, catalpa, elm, and hackberry, with red buds sometimes growing beneath their taller neighbors.
Caldwell’s preference for trees placed naturally rather than in straight, predetermined rows also accounts for the freedom of arboreal arrangements observable throughout the campus. Further attention in the space north of Crown Hall has been paid to the lawn, which covers the site of a Mies-designed classroom building never built because of insufficient funds. There the earth has been lowered by feet. Spring bulbs have been planted along the periphery, and the walls have been beveled so that spectators can sit casually along the borders. The north end of the lawn is called the Galvin-Pritzker Grove, the name engraved on the long bench that overlooks it. The lindens growing in front of Main Hall were planted by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill in the early 1960s, following the completion of Hermann Hall and Galvin Library. Schaudt and his colleagues decided to remove the lower branches in order to allow more sunshine to wash the ground. They also installed limestone benches in the area and laid down crushed granite. Elsewhere, pink concrete campus sidewalks west of State Street that Mies himself had specified have been restored. And pedestrian lights now illuminate the walks bordering the main east-west axis of the campus, Thirty-third Street, where more plantings have lately taken root.
To this day, thanks to the efforts of the university’s Facilities and the College of Architecture, Masters of Landscape + Urbanism Program professors and students, preserving this landscape as envisioned by Caldwell and achieving the first level of Arboretum, are well in hand.
Schulze, Franz, The Campus Guide, Illinois Institute of Technology, An Architectural Tour by Franz Schulze, Foreword by Lew Collens. Princeton Architectural Press, New York, 2005.
