Roughly bounded by 31st St., State St., 325th St. and the Dan Ryan Expressway, Chicago, Illinois. County/parish: Cook.
Added to the National Register of Historic Places August 12, 2005. NRIS 05000871.
26 contributing buildings.Also known as:
The Illinois Institute of Technology Academic Campus (or Main Campus) is one of the five campuses of the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT), located in Bronzeville on the South Side of Chicago, Illinois, United States. It is roughly bounded by 30th Street, Michigan Avenue, 35th Street, and the Rock Island District railroad line. Parts of the campus, comprising 26 buildings between 31st, State, and 35th streets and the Rock Island railroad, are designated as a National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) historic district. The campus includes buildings constructed both by IIT and one of its predecessors, the Armour Institute, which was established in the neighborhood in 1890. Its layout is derived from a master plan devised in the 1940s by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the director of IIT's architecture school from 1938 to 1958.
The Armour Institute included five buildings; three of the remaining structures are part of the NRHP district. These buildings were all designed by Patton & Fisher (later Patton, Fisher & Miller) in the Romanesque style, with red brick and stone facades. When the Armour Institute merged with the Lewis Institute in 1940, Mies was hired to design a master plan for IIT's campus. The first building under his master plan was completed in 1943, and Mies continued to oversee the design until his resignation in 1958. Mies's designs are generally low-rise structures with concrete or steel exterior frames and brick-and-glass facades, although some designs, such as S. R. Crown Hall, deviated from this trend.
After Mies's resignation, Walter Netsch and Myron Goldsmith of Skidmore, Owings, & Merrill (SOM) each designed multiple buildings for the campus, largely adhering to Mies's designs. The local firm of Schmidt, Garden & Erikson designed additional buildings for the IIT Research Institute (IITRI). SOM and another firm, Mittelbusher & Tourtelot, designed additional buildings such as dormitories and fraternity houses, which are not included in the NRHP district. After Mies's master plan was completed in 1971, no significant construction occurred for more than two decades. Rem Koolhaas's McCormick Tribune Campus Center and Helmut Jahn's State Street Village were both completed in 2003, and a technology building by John Ronan Architects opened in 2018.
(read more...)National Park Service documentation: https://catalog.archives.gov/id/28892350