Mies’s Convention Hall: Convergence of Teaching and Architecture

Abstract

On November 19, 1953, the Chicago Daily Tribune published an article on Mies’s proposal for the city’s new Convention Center.1 The following month, Engineering News-Record magazine gave more details of on the project, pointing out, among other things, that Mies had taken Frank Kornacker on board as structural engineer.2 However, not all the literature on this project explains its evolution as well as the involvement of the team that took part in it. In trying to establish a chronology of the literature that has been written on Mies’s work in the course of the past century, we can find that the project for a Convention Hall is included in the monograph published by the exBauhäuser Max Bill in 1955. Afterwards, the reprint of the catalog that had been edited by Philip Johnson in 1947, along with the biographies produced by the likes of Ludwig Hilberseimer, Arthur Drexler, and Werner Blaser, or by some of their students at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) in Chicago, such as James A. Speyer, describe the project as the best of Mies’s attempts to reduce architecture to pure structure: “It is a terminal statement of the clear span building. It transcends its structural and utilitarian basis (...) it illustrates perfectly that aphorism of Viollet-le-Duc, the father of structural rationalism, “any form that is not dictated by the structure should be postponed.”3