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In the Students’ Center of the IIT (published in a+t 23. New Materiality I), Rem Koolhaas has hacked off the rosy cheeks of Mies, soiling the candor of Augustinian truth with abject materials. In an interview he states that here he doesn’t use a wide range of materials. In the end, he says, he uses a limited palette, just like Mies.

Glass and steel give way to light panels. With these panels and a patent called Panelite, which consists of a sheet of glass or polyester resin with a honeycomb core, he builds a wide variety of walls and partitions. Miesian puritanism with regard steel, with those perfectly shaped corners drawn with exquisite candor, is transformed by the mad race toward the generic into a construction with a material as abject and iconoclastic as light paneling; a flashy, orange-toned translucent panel that recalls fastfood eateries and that, in a perverse play of contrasts, brings even more attention to Mies’s nil use of color. Here the material is not chosen for its physical properties. It intervenes in the project on a moral basis, precisely its being good turned evil. Mies said that everything can be or be nothing. As Koolhaas writes, Mies’s is a science purely based on belief.

Photos taken by Javier Mozas and Aurora Ferández Per, available under request.

Published in a+t 23: New Materiality I

Crown Hall. Mies van der Rohe. Metal framework detail. Ventilation grid

Crown Hall. Mies van der Rohe. Access platform

Student Center. OMA. Angle between the leopard pattern asphalt fabric and the resin panel with square perforations that allow the fixation of signs

Student Center. OMA. Lower side of the angle. Steel profile supporting the panel and vertical steel tubes

Student Center. OMA. Supporting structure for the resin panel with square perforations that allow the fixation of signs. View from the inside

Student Center. OMA. Leopard pattern asphalt fabric cladding and metal framework underneath. Above: corrugated metal sheet wrapping the CTA tunnel

Student Center. OMA. Detail of the leopard pattern asphalt fabric cladding. Inexpensive finishing of bright red paint for exterior use

Student Center. OMA. Pillars of the CTA line that overflies the building. Downpipe.

Student Center. OMA. Leopard pattern asphalt fabric cladding and metal framework underneath. Above: corrugated metal sheet wrapping the CTA tunnel

Student Center. OMA. Entry door wrapped with the pixelated image from a CCTV camera

Student Center. OMA. Detail of a Panelite desk

Buffer space between OMA’s building and Mies’ Commons Hall. Cylindrical connecting piece

Student Center on the right and Mies’ Commons Hall on the left of the image. Different material, common language

IIT Campus. Mies Vander Rohe. Grooves adapt the brick to the metal support width