Pezo Von Ellrichshausen wins first MCHAP Emerging Architecture award

ArchDaily reported on Thursday that the Chilean firm of Pezo Von Ellrichshausen has won the first awarding of the new Mies Crown Hall Americas Prize for Emerging Architecture, which comes with $25,000 cash and a research professorship at IIT, whose school of Architecture is sponsoring the prize.  Pezo Von Ellrichshausen won for their Casa Poli on Chile's Coliumo peninsula, completed in 2005.   In 2008, ArchDaily published an extensive photoset on the project.  This fall, the winner will be announced for the Mies Crown Hall Americas Prize, chosen by a jury from 225 nominees of work completed in North and South American between January of 2000 and December 2013.

Read More:

Four Finalists for MCHAP for Emerging Architecture to present in IIT's Crown Hall.

Archipalooza! Not One. Not Two. Three Chicago Schools Showcase Student Work on Friday

Exactly what are they teaching the kids in architecture school today?  Well, Friday, May 9th gives you the perfect opportunity to find out, as three major Chicago architecture schools will be showcasing the work of their students on the same day.

The School of Architecture at the University of Illinois at Chicago will be holding its Year End Show at the galleries of the A and D Studios, 845 West Harrison Street, from 5:00 to 7:30 p.m. while in the building's south lobby, Friday and Saturday are the last days for Myth, the exhibition by Molly Hunker, winner of this year's Douglas A. Garofalo Fellowship.


Meanwhile, down at Crown Hall, 3360 South State, IIT's College of Architecture will also have it's annual Student Work Exhibition and Open House, kicking off at 5:00 p.m., with the presentation of the Louis Vuitton SPARK Award chosen from six finalists “from IIT's undergraduate and graduate Cloud Studio program reflecting the College's focus on the City of Chicago and ‘Rethinking the Metropolis.’”.  At 5:45 there will be the Spring Student Award Ceremony, followed by the Open House studio exhibition from 6:30 to 8:30.


Last but not least, at Sullivan Center (a/k/a the Louis Sullivan designed former Carson Pirie Scott

building), 36th South Wabash, 12th floor, from 6:00 to 9:00 p.m., you can take in SAIC's 2014 Thesis Show: Masters of Architecture and Masters of Architecture with an emphasis in Interior Architecture . .  .

The graduating class of 2014 in the [School of the Art Institute's] newly accredited Master of Architecture program invites you to a year-end exhibition of their thesis work.  Please come to meet the graduates, have some refreshments, and celebrate the 5th graduating class of Chicago's 3rd professional architecture program.

Make it into a pub crawl, going from show to show and downing a shot every time someone mentions parametricism.  After it's over, head down to the Palmer House, up to the Wit, or whatever's chacun à son goût for continuing lubrication and to try start a brawl debating the deficiencies and merits of what you've just seen.   

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 Montréal, 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

Wang Shu at Crown Hall Tomorrow

I guess it's never to late to add another event to the March calendar.

We received word today that Pritzker-Prize winning architect Wang Shu, who will be lecturing at the Art Institute this evening, will also participate in a panel discussion that will take place tomorrow, March 29th, in the upper Core at Crown Hall, IIT, 3360 South State.  The event is free and open to the public. 

In a related note, the lecture at IIT by Juhani Pallasmaa, Minding Design: Neuroscience, Design Education, and the Imagination,  has been moved up a day, and will now take place Monday, April 1st, 6:00 p.m. at the McCormick Tribune Campus Center, 3201 South State.  We're working on the April calendar and hope to have it up soon.  (Seriously - no April fooling.)

The World of Wiel Arets lands at IIT

click images for larger view

Modesty is often not the first thing that comes to mind when thinking of architects, but the College of Architecture at IIT may be about to test it out.

It was a clear theme in the inaugural lecture by IIT's new Dean of the College of Architecture Wiel Arets last Wednesday, starting with the introduction by architect John Ronan.

"When Wiel Arets came to Chicago to interview for the Dean position at IIT", said Ronan, "we took him out to dinner the night before his interview. The very first thing he said to us was, 'You have to understand, I’m not a teacher, I’m a student.' Four hours later, as we were the last party to leave the restaurant, and they were putting chairs on the tables, we knew we had begun an interesting dialogue that would have profound implications for IIT in Chicago." 

"The school is you," Arets told the assembled students. "You are my colleagues."

Arets, 57, who was named to his IIT post this past August, was previously Dean of Rotterdam's Berlage Institute from 1995 to 2002.  In his Wednesday talk, to an overflow crowd that spilled into Crown Hall's lower core, he gave an overview of the work of his firm Wiel Arets Architects that  stressed his optimistic view of the future, including the possibilities of the PAL-V flying car.

When someone was designing a flying car five years ago it was a young student of the University of Delft.  He saw that we were able to fly with a car we can develop and even James Bond is jealous. I think at this moment one of fifty of these cars are being produced in Holland and the only problem we have is that we are not allowed to fly with them, because the rules are not allowing us to do so. I think that’s something we have to be aware of as architects. We have to be aware as architects that rules sometimes allows not to do what we want to do.

Branson is promising the world that L.A. and London will be less than two hours apart. This is the map of the world with borders. This is the map of the world without borders. That’s a world I would like to see.

This subway map positioned on a map of the world is telling us that when we take the plane or subway that we think we go from place to place. We go maybe from Chicago to New York, or from Chicago to L.A., but are we going really there? The idea that we are moving from one place to another in a physical world where we have no clue what we are doing . . . I push a button and things happen. I think that’s something I’m interested in, the fact that the world will become, and is probably already one city.

The world is one city with neighborhoods as this map shows you. When this could happen and will happen, then the cities will be not only the center point; the cities will be connected to each other, like Being, Seoul and Tokyo in Asia.  The area the we are in now will be one of the bigger neighborhoods, as well. When this is happening , then the world will shrink for us, since we can move from one place to another in less than two hours.

On the other hand, I believe that diversity and the local conditions are maybe even more important than ever.

That's a rather tall order, especially since the wide range of the world that we are compressing to simultaneity is not just geographic, but social and economic.  More people are flying and traveling than ever before, yet that group represents but a small, highly privileged subset of humanity.   The central contradiction is reflected in Arets' own striking body of work, which ranges from everything from Living Madrid, a social housing project . . .

photograph courtesy Wiel Arets Architects

, , , to the Utrecht University Library . .

photograph courtesy Wiel Arets Architects

 . . . to Hedge House, for a man with seven cars and a special room for his chickens . . .

photograph courtesy Wiel Arets Architects

What it will all mean for IIT I really don't know.   At times, it seems both too much and too little.  The mind reels, and I follow the advice of Arets as he closed Wednesday's talk . . .

"I think, John, we should have a drink."