Illinois Institute of Technology

Brief information

The Illinois Institute of Technology grew out of a story that began almost like an urban legend: a sermon in a church near the present-day campus led to a million-dollar donation and the creation of the Armour Institute. Later it merged with the Lewis Institute, and in 1940 the current university came into being.

This matters not for the sake of chronology, but for the way one looks at the place. The campus on Chicago’s South Side was conceived as a large, unified university grounds, and its overall concept and some of its buildings were designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. The institute should therefore be read not only as a collection of departments, but as a space where educational history took on architectural form.

What to notice first

The source text says little about specific visible details, so it is better to keep the focus on confirmed facts. It makes sense to compare three layers of the place: the campus as a unified space, individual buildings connected with Mies van der Rohe’s design, and buildings protected as monuments of Neo-Romanesque architecture. This shows that the site was not a random scattering of buildings: both the overall concept and the preserved fragments of an earlier architectural language matter here.

Another clue is the names of the divisions. Armour College of Engineering, Lewis College of Science and Letters, and Chicago-Kent College of Law remind us that the university was formed from different educational traditions: technical, humanistic-scientific, and legal. Because of this, the campus can be perceived as a place where an engineering school gradually absorbed design, law, business, and architecture without losing its connection to its original professional training.