The anti-Pritzker? Wiel Arets Gets IIT into the Architecture Awards Game: $50,000 Mies Crown Hall Americas Prize to be announced today

I think Mies was a great thinker and a master in scale. He was someone who under- stood that there has to be a distance between us and a building, just as there is a distance between us and nature. Today this is dwindling. When you read Mies�s texts, they were short and precise, and that makes him a model for all of us. Mies knew what architecture was about, and he knew how the architectural product was part of our landscape, environment, and world. It would be great to announce at this very place, in 2015, the first North American architect, and emerging architect, to receive the Mies Crown Hall North America Prize; to establish this prize would be a challenge and a stimulating event for the global architectural discourse.

That was Dean of IIT College of Architecture Wiel Arets talking early last year in NOWNESS, the publication reflecting how �Arets is leading the movement of the COA toward �nowness� - a multifaceted approach to the discipline of architecture and the embracing of urbanism in the world's metropolises.�

Less than a year later, a major piece of the campaign is falling into place.  Today at 1:00 p.m., from CCA Montr�al, there will be an announcement - streamed live - of the establishing of the biannual Mies Crown Hall Americas Prize, which has its own website here.

The Americas Prize will laud those built works that recognize the altered circumstances of the human condition. It will honor those projects that consider how we might elevate the quality of our built environments by extending our interests beyond the proverbial four walls. It will endorse those who acknowledge the interdisciplinary nature of our new ventures. Above all, it will recognize those who have invested their work with the mystery and power of human imagination. The objective is to reward the daring contemplation of the intersection of the new metropolis and human ecology.

The $50,000 Americas Prize will honor �the best architectural work in the Americas completed in the preceding two years. � It will come with �the MCHAP Chair at Illinois Insitute of Technology� for a year, where the winners will give a public lecture and  �establish research related to the theme of �rethinking the metropolis�.�   The work will be featured in a MCHAP Book, along that of finalists and other projects the jury may choice to recognize.   Last December, the COA was posting open positions for both a Director of Publishing and a MCHAP Co-ordinator.  The Americas Prize Director will serve as a non-voting member of the five-person jury.

There will be a benefits dinner this spring, with the awards ceremony scheduled for this October.  More information - and, presumably, a link to this afternoon's noon CDT live stream  - here.

Previously:

The World of Wiel Arets lands at IIT.  Read here.

The redesign of the interior of Mies van der Rohe's Crown Hall: Glass Boxes within the Ultimate Glass Box

click images for larger view

The new academic year has brought some interesting changes to the interior configurations of Mies van der Rohe's iconic Crown Hall, home to the School of Architecture of the Illinois Institute of Technology.

At 220 by 120 by 18 feet tall, it's sometimes been described as the world's largest single-room schoolhouse.  Still, Mies split up the space with subtle low partitions, primarily the free-standing oak panels that define the center core.  Along with the student desks, those panels were renovated as part of a major 2005 restoration, as well as the student storage lockers that also served as de facto dividers.

Now those lockers are gone . . .  

They've been replaced with twin, newly-constructed blocks of spaces along the building's north side.

No ceilings.  Boxes within a box, the new rooms mirror in miniature Crown Hall's exterior structure - glass walls within painted metal frames, complete with Miesian corners.

New Dean Wiel Arets and other administrators now have their offices on the same floor occupied by their students.

Previously, the Dean's office was in the building's basement lower level, where the redesign has been much more radical.   Ironically, as open as Mies made Crown Hall's first floor, the lower level was a rabbit's warren of offices and meeting spaces.  Now, it's a truer expression of Mies concept of universal space. Specifically, the Center Core was once confined to the area between the two central staircases.  Now it's essentially one continuous space that traverses the entire length of building . . .

Similarly, what was previously a sequence of closed-off rooms is now two open studio spaces, one in the northeast corner . . .

the other in the northwest . . .

What used to be the Dean's office has now become part of an expanded Graham Resource Center, allowing the library added room to breathe, and, as needed, fill up with more stuff.

The day I took these pictures, nothing was going on in the lower core, and judging from some comments to this post, that might be for the best.  There are reports that the space is an acoustical nightmare, loud and buzzy to the point of dysfunction.  Some students have complained that the removal of the lockers have left them no place to store their supplies.  The redesign appears to have become a lightning rod for those unenamored of the changes Arets has made both to the building and the curriculum.

One interesting change that may not be new but that I just noticed is the central staircases . . . the east staircase retains its original Miesian right-angled purity . . .

. . . but the west staircase, retrofitted with rails for a universal access lift, has taken on a curvy, almost Art Nouveau vibe . . .

A refinement of philosophy is encapsulated in these changes.  In place of Miesian reserve, the Dean has now placed himself in the midst of the students.  Hierarchy is softened, but remains clearly expressed - if with shortened proximity - in a glass-walled �almost nothing� expression of separation.

Less than a decade after its last major renovation,  the structure of Crown Hall endures intact even as its universal space evolves.

Read More:

Mies Resurrected - the story of Crown Hall

Crown Hall - Decline and Rebirth

Crown Hall - The Legacy of Crown Hall

New Music for Teshigahara's Gaudi, plus Zardini, Arets, Lorado Taft, Edward Dart - more for March!

Yes, we're still adding to the March Calendar of Chicago Architectural Events.

If you missed 60 Minutes' segment last night on Antonio Gaudi and Barcelona's Sagrada Familia, you can check it out in the above video.  The cathedral has certainly come a long way from when I was there over ten years ago - the wonders of substituting concrete for stone, I guess.  And on the Gaudi front, here's something really cool. 

Showing Hiroshi's Teshigahara's mesmerizing documentary Antonio Gaudi has become an annual Christmas holiday staple at the Gene Siskel, but now Access Contemporary Music is giving the film a new spin, with a one-time-only showing at Architectural Artifacts on March 19th accompanied by a live performance of a new score by Chicago composers.  More details here.

The week starts off Monday the 11th with a face-off between Canadian Centre for Architecture ExecDir Mirko Zarini at UIC, and new IIT Dean of Architecture Wiel Arets at Unity Temple.

On Tuesday, the 12th, SEAOI's March dinner meeting at the Parthenon (again, the restaurant, not the bombed-out wreck in Athens) has structural engineer John R. Hillman talking about the striking new 35th Pedestrian Bridge.  That same evening, Lynn Allyn Young talks about her new book on Lorado Taft, Beautiful Dreamer, at the Glessner House Museum.

Wednesday the 13th, Richard Becker, Lisa Skolnick and Susan Benjamin discuss Edward Dart's Ancel House at CAF lunchtime, while in Crown Hall that evening, it's the 127th birthday party for Mies van der Rohe, which also will mark the investiture of Wiel Arets as the new Dean of the architecture school Mies founded.  No more kicking back in a Barcelona chair and smoking a chair, alas, but there will be cocktails and hors d'oeuvres.

Thursday the 14th,  again at IIT, but at the Auditorium at the Koolhaas Campus Center, Kenneth Frampton stops by to talk about The Past and Future Prospects for Architectural Education, while at the Richard Driehaus Museum, Rolf Achilles discusses Great Midwestern Panes from such Chicago artists as Healy and Millet and Max Guler.

That's just a few of the two events this week, and nearly thirty items still to come on the March Calendar of Chicago Architectural Events.

Rojos at UIC Tonight, plus Nair, Shaw, Atomic West and Democracy and the Built Environment - still more for February!

You might think that at this point, we were just waiting for March and spring, and that February was pretty much finished.  You'd be wrong.  This is one active week on the February Calendar of Chicago Architectural Events.

Today, Monday the 25th, the School of Architecture of UIC kicks off its spring lecture series with Luis Rojo of Rojo/Fern�ndez-Shaw arquitectos of Madrid.  

On Tuesday, the 26th, the Chicago Loop Alliance has its 2013 Annual Meeting, and superstar structural engineer Dr. Shankar Nair lectures of Skyscrapers-Past, Present and Future at CAF for the Structural Engineers Association of Illinois, while down at the Koolhaas Campus Center at IIT, Peter Onuf and Marshall Brown will deliver the Benjamin Franklin Lecture: Democracy and the Built Environment.

Wednesday, the 27th, Terry McDonnell talks about engineering the (Sears) Willis Tower Skydeck lunchtime at CAF, while over at the Driehaus Museum, a/k/a/ Nickerson Mansion, Stuart Cohen will discuss The Architecture of Howard Van Doren Shaw: Reimaging the Traditional House.

It all wraps up on Thursday, the 28th, with Navigating Change, an all-day conference of the Midwest Ecological Landscaping Association, a Friends of the Parks lecture on Walter Netsch's Legacy, Robert Chattel talking about the The Atomic Wild Wild West at SAIC, and Fritz Haeg discussing Domestic Integrities at the Graham.

To give you a small preview, March begins with a bang on the 1st with the barnstorming new dean Wiel Arets at the College of Architecture at IIT stopping by Frank Lloyd Wright's Unity Temple in Oak Park with A Wonderful World.

More on March later.  For now, there are nearly two dozen great items still to come this month.  Check them all out on the February calendar of Chicago Architectural Events