Ellington under Glass

In November 1957 Mies van der Rohe’s Crown Hall at IIT broke with convention when it became the venue for a jazz concert by Duke Ellington and his orchestra. This extraordinary event is reconstructed based on personal recollections, campus newspapers and other archival material. In the context of architectural pedagogy Crown Hall is appreciated as a supreme expression of Mies’s architectural philosophy, both for its spatial openness and its spiritual character. Here, influences from Mies’s own evolution as an architect intersected with developments in modern music and performance art it inspired. Parallels are uncovered between Ellington’s jazz and Mies’s steel and glass architecture, both distinctly American idioms that characterise post-war modernity. The Ellington concert at Crown Hall presented the perfect synthesis of people, space, light, music and nature. At the same time it attested to the disruptive potential that exists in jazz and modern architecture alike.