S. R. Crown Hall

The S.R. Crown Hall is the main building of the College of Architecture, Planning and Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology ( IIT) in Chicago.

She is one of the masterpieces of the architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and is considered one of the most important buildings of modern architecture or the International Style.

History

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe emigrated in 1938 to the United States of America and took over the same year the direction of the Department of Architecture of the Armour Institute in Chicago. This merged soon after with the Lewis Institute to the Illinois Institute of Technology ( IIT). In 1940 he was entrusted with the overall planning of the new university campus of IIT and realized even then a number of departmental buildings on campus. The Crown Hall is one of these and was built in 1954-1956 as a new main building of the Department of Architecture. With the architects and the urban planners and designers were housed here.

Because of its classic design it by critics was often set with classical or neo-classical buildings in relationship. Mies van der Rohe himself summed up: "I think this is the clearest construction we 've ever made, and it expresses the best of our philosophy. " ( Spaeth, p 130)

2001 was registered Crown Hall as a National Historic Landmark. After an extensive renovation and technical overhaul it is since 2005 mainly for temporary and representative events back into use.

In the work of Mies van der Rohe's Crown Hall is between the small Farnsworth House (1951 ) of comparable construction and the unrealized design competition for the National Theater in Mannheim (1954 ), which would have also been quite similar in construction, but much larger. It is an early example of the second addition to the high-rise building type important his American period, the supportless use variable hall room, also called " universal space." His last building of this type, but with direction- neutral ceiling construction, the New National Gallery ( 1967) in Berlin.

Description

The Crown Hall has two floors and rises on an area of ​​120 × 220 feet ( 36.60 × 67.00 m) to a height of 24 feet (7.40 m). The inset in the ground basement extends 6 feet (1.85 m) beyond the terrain surface and is characterized by reinforced concrete columns in a grid of 30 × 20 feet ( 9.25 × 6.17 m) divided. Here was the Institute of Design accommodated especially with its seminar rooms, workshops, offices and the library.

The architecture department was the hall overlying the basement are available. This hall extends over the entire footprint of the building ( 2,450 m²) and is designed with granite tops. Without supports in the room it is divided only by two floor to ceiling installation shafts, some holzverschalte partitions and the two interior staircases. The remaining surfaces are free disposable.

The primary structure consists of four on the sides at a distance of 18 m is clamped in the soil columns made of steel H-beams, which are connected to each other by 1.88 m high steel full wall ties, of which the roof structure is suspended ( static with Frank Kornacker ). Buildings Tall Double T - Steel profiles frame the large windows of the entire building from the ground to the roof. All steel parts are made of industrially prefabricated, commercially available semi-finished products, the compounds according to the standard usually welded and the whole structure is covered with a black protective coating.

The glass surfaces of the facades in the basement and the lower door high game of the hall are made of translucent glass (milk glass). The building will have two external stairs opened up in the center axis of the longitudinal sides that rise from the ground to the hall lead down into the center about two interior stairs into the basement.

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