Since just after the Great Fire of 1871, Chicago has been a franchise player in global architecture. You can’t walk more than a few blocks around the Loop or North Michigan Avenue without stumbling on some remarkable structure that could happen to be one of the world’s most renowned buildings. But there’s a lesser-known treasure trove, more dispersed but no less rich, and that’s on college campuses, which seem to breed like rabbits here. Dozens have left their mark on the built landscape.
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Some of the schools’ buildings are deservedly famous: There’s Walter Netsch’s classic–and controversial–brutalist structures at UIC. At IIT, Mies’s gloriously restored 1956 masterpiece, Crown Hall, has recently been joined by two new megastars, Helmut Jahn’s State Street Village, as sleek as a streamlined 1920s passenger rail car, and Rem Koolhaas’s riotous McCormick Tribune Campus Center, with its angled roof, orange glass, and stainless steel, rigatoni-shaped tube muffling the roar of the CTA trains as they speed through the campus.
But there are plenty of less-well-known university buildings that are also worth a look. At IIT, a school overrun with architectural landmarks, it’s easy to miss the Robert F. Carr Memorial Chapel (65 E. 32nd St.). Completed in 1952, it’s the only church building designed by the great Mies van der Rohe. It’s made of load-bearing bricks, not Mies’s usual steel, and unique among Mies’s campus buildings, it has an exposed ceiling rather than dropped tile. Known on campus as the “God box,” the chapel has an austere, monastic elegance. The interior consists of but one room, with steel-framed glass on the walls facing east and west. An astringently simple stainless steel cross hangs above an altar cut from a single block of travertine marble, in front of a floor-to-ceiling curtain. The space is as unadorned as a storage shed. No icons, no paintings, no Gothic ornament, no Bible stories evoked in colorful stained glass. Just you and your maker.
Columbia College, however, can be said to have saved an entire neighborhood, becoming the hermit crab of the South Loop. Beginning with the 1976 purchase of 600 S. Michigan, a 16-story skyscraper built for the International Harvester Company in 1907, Columbia has expanded by snapping up a growing array of vintage buildings. Today, its nearly 12,000 students are spread across 16 structures with over a million square feet of space, including the Dance Center of Columbia College (1306 S. Michigan), a 1930 art deco edifice built as the Paramount Publix Corporation when the area served as home to the local offices of all the major movie studios.
