Chicago -- If you're older than about 25, the thing you'll want to keep in mind about Rem Koolhaas's new McCormick Tribune Campus Center at the Illinois Institute of Technology is that it's really not meant for you, or

A train emerges from the tube above the new campus center.

anyone else in your demographic. Its shapes are as fractured as a cartoon's. Its colors are garish -- safety-vest orange and a pale, mint-ice-cream green -- and at night its lights create a glare unforgiving of the slightest laugh line. It's so loud that even in the faculty dining area you can barely have a conversation without shouting. It's unmistakably a building for students.

And man, is it ever fun. The gleaming stainless-steel tube that funnels elevated trains right over the middle of it is only the start. The chasm filled with computer stations, the windowed bridge that carries a garden above the food court, the mysterious wallpaper that seems to have depth to it, the surprisingly comfortable orange plastic chairs -- its delights go on and on. We're talking gush-to-the-cabdriver-on-the-way-home fun, e-mail-photos-to-your-architect-friends fun. We're talking about a building that belongs right up there with Louis Sullivan's Auditorium Theater and Frank Lloyd Wright's Robie House as a must-see on tours of Chicago architecture.

Luckily, adding the campus center to architecture tours won't be difficult. Any tour worth its salt comes to IIT anyway, to see its unsurpassed collection of Modernist buildings by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who became the institute's

Students check their mail on computers near the coffee shop.

architecture dean in 1938 and designed 18 buildings for it in the next 20 years. Indeed, the new campus center embraces one of the Mies buildings, known as the Commons, and pays homage to it by making one of its corners the focus of three walls of windows.

What's more, the campus center isn't the only IIT building attracting attention this fall. Helmut Jahn's new residence-hall complex, just across 33rd Street, would be the standout of any other campus or any other year. Clad in curving, corrugated steel that echoes that of the campus center's giant tube, the complex is more entertaining than any dormitory anyone over 25 ever dreamed of living in. It's bold enough to hold its own beside the new student center and at the same time simple enough to be respectful of Mies's masterpiece, Crown Hall, located on the other side of State Street.

Both new buildings owe their existence to a planning group the institute convened almost 10 years ago, says Lew Collens, IIT's president. "Everything was on the table," he says. "There was a serious discussion of whether we should move to the suburbs." Architecture aficionados ceaselessly praise Mies's stark steel-and-glass buildings, he says, "but it's a hard aesthetic for the average person to understand."

He adds: "It's a campus that, from an institutional-competitiveness standpoint, is difficult to appreciate." Or to put in another way, it looked lousy on admissions tours.

It didn't help that the institute had let maintenance on the Mies buildings slip, so that concrete steps spalled, painted surfaces grew rough, and window air-conditioners disfigured walls. And what landscaping there was seemed like an afterthought. Another problem was that decades of decline had made the neighborhood unappealing.

Nonetheless, the institute committed itself to staying. Along with renovating a core group of Mies buildings to create "a state-of-the-art Mies museum," Mr. Collens says, the planning team recommended doing something about a long, empty

Helmut Jahn's new residence-hall complex.

strip that separated the academic and residential portions of the campus. The strip, once filled with typical urban buildings, had become a wasteland of parking lots bisected by the elevated tracks. Noise from the trains, which run as often as every six minutes, was another problem the planning group suggested fixing, although it didn't say how.

IIT's next move was a deft one: It hired the architect Dirk Lohan to prepare a master plan. Because Mr. Lohan is a grandson of Mies, the choice helped soothe what some refer to as the "Mies police" -- those alarmed by any plan they see as a threat to the purity of Mies's architectural legacy. It was Mr. Lohan who suggested locating a new campus center in the middle of the empty strip. In deference to the quality of his grandfather's work here, he also proposed holding an international architectural competition to choose the new building's designer.

Which is how Mr. Koolhaas, who is Dutch, came to be hired in 1998 for his first building in the United States. His proposal to encase the train tracks in a 530-foot-long tube and build directly underneath it created a tremendous buzz, but it also committed IIT to a lengthy and expensive process. The campus center proper couldn't be started until the $13.6-million tube had been completed, and much of the work on the tube could only take place between midnight and 5 a.m., when trains weren't running. But the good news was that the State of Illinois contributed $9-million toward building the tube, which is open at the top to channel train noise upward.

The campus center itself cost $34.6-million and ended up at 110,000 square feet, after several features were subtracted to keep the price tag down. Donna Robertson, the dean of architecture, was a member of the committee that wrote the program for the building. She says it was intended both to create a campus crossroads and to bring a variety of student services together under one roof. It now houses the dean of students, the bookstore, student organizations, a coffee seller, and a copy shop, with a convenience store soon to come.

Also, she says, "we wanted a building with curb appeal."

That they got. Besides the tube, the State Street facade features orange panels of a translucent, honeycombed plastic material called Panelite, plus a doorway with a clever two-story portrait of Mies. The portrait, by the New York communications and design collaborative 2x4, is in turn made up of hundreds of small, stylized representations of humans engaged in dozens of activities -- lifting weights, kissing, walking in the rain, even falling off skateboards. The small images come together like pixels to make up the Mies portrait.

As they pass the south end of the building, motorists can see that Mr. Koolhaas's roofline sags, as if being deformed by the weight of the tube pressing down on it. The interior carries this conceit even further. In the

A ramp zig-zags up stairs that can double as seating.

game area, the corrugated steel of the tube protrudes through the ceiling; above the chasm filled with computers, the roof comes low into the main space of the building, as if it had splintered under pressure from above. Conveniently, this dip in the roofline permits a narrow band of windows bringing in daylight.

Daylight is one of the building's obsessions, in fact. Windows line the perimeter as well as two interior courtyards, one of which serves as the frame for the adjoining Mies building. In addition, windows line both sides of the garden bridge that crosses above the food court like an elongated, hanging courtyard. The interior is also brightened by aluminum floor panels.

The campus center is only one story high, although the food court, the faculty dining area, the auditorium, and the ballroom are all set well below grade. Visitors to the food court are sure to be intrigued by a broad flight of stairs crisscrossed by the switchbacks of a handicap-access ramp. The stairs can double as seating for presentations. Equally entertaining are interlocking

The view from the roof deck of one of the new residence halls.

men's and women's restrooms with Panelite walls whose curves suggest the insides of beehives. The building has dozens of other little surprises besides.

Mr. Jahn's residence-hall complex next door is, by comparison, a monument to plainness. Three connected buildings, each with two wings, make up the 367-bed complex, which took just over a year to build and cost $28-million. It is, in a sense, much cleverer than the campus center, because it accomplishes its goals so more simply. By locating the complex's service components on the side facing the tracks, Mr. Jahn protects students' rooms from the racket. Meanwhile, the complex creates a new buffer between the tracks and the academic area of the campus.

Unexpectedly, the walls facing the tracks are all glass, making the building a surprisingly welcome sight for commuters, especially after the blankness of the tube's interior. At night a line of blue light runs along the back of the building at the third-floor level, for train riders' amusement. Mr. Jahn, an IIT alumnus who is perhaps Chicago's best-known living architect, has given something back not only to his college but also to his fellow Chicagoans.

The end walls of each wing in the complex are also glass, providing the students' rooms with floor-to-ceiling windows. It's the long, beautifully sculpted facade facing Crown Hall that is formed of corrugated steel and that appears from the ground to curve around unbroken and become the complex's roof.

Night view of the end of one of the new residence halls.

Although the facade runs the length of the complex, its starkness is relieved by inset plazas filled with trees. The plazas lead to the buildings' entrances, so that returning students spend a few moments surrounded by nature before going inside. In fact, the buildings all have roof decks, partly shaded by perforated steel, partly open to the skyand with great views of Chicago's skyscrapers. Inside, the buildings feature plain rooms, high-style bathrooms, and spare contemporary furniture.

IIT has accompanied the two new buildings with a new landscaping program that, among other things, has brought 1,500 new trees to the blocks of State Street running through the campus. The neighborhood has stabilized, too, as the city replaced a public-housing project with mixed-income development. And Mr. Collens, the president, says the institute will probably end up spending some $75-million on renovations to key buildings on the Mies portion of the campus. Which would be money well spent in any case, but all the more so now: Because of the two new buildings, Mr. Collens says, "the tourists are back, in large numbers."

(December, 2003)

Copyright © 2003 by Lawrence Biemiller