Armour Institute/Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT)

The Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) is Ph.D.-granting private university in Chicago with programs in engineering, architecture, design, science, human sciences, applied technology, business, and law. One of the largest of its kind in the nation, IIT formed in 1940 with the merging of two technical schools: the Armour Institute, established in 1893 on the South Side by meat-packing industrialist Paul Danforth Armour, Sr. (1832–1901), and the Lewis Institute, a high school and junior college founded in 1895 from the estate of Allen Cleveland Lewis (1821–1877). Sharing complementary pedagogies, the consolidated institutes offered a professional education based on science, engineering, management, and the humanities. Other incorporations followed as IIT expanded the scope of its research and educational programs. The Institute of Design joined IIT in 1949 and the Chicago-Kent College of Law in 1969. Historically characterized by its active relationships with industries and businesses in Chicago, IIT is home to research centers such as the Nation Center for Food Safety and Technology and the IIT Research Institute. 

The IIT Main Campus is renowned worldwide for its modernist architecture. German-born architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886–1969) joined IIT as its first Director of Architecture in 1938 after the closure of the Bauhaus in Weimar by the Nazi regime. During his two-decade tenure at IIT, Mies not only reshaped the curriculum, leading to the reputation of IIT as “the New Bauhaus,” he also orchestrated the master plan of the campus. Envisioned by Mies as an icon of modernity, the IIT Main Campus was entirely reconceived and expanded in the 1940s and 1950s. Laid out following a uniform module determining the size and articulation of each building in relation to one another, the IIT campus was designed to embody rationality, clarity, and economy. Mies’s twenty-two buildings for IIT find their stylistic zenith in the aptly named S.R. Crown Hall (1956) which houses the College of Architecture, Planning, and Design. Conceptually groundbreaking, the building is characterized by its innovative exposed steel structure and its clear-span, column-less interior. S.R. Crown Hall received a National Historic Landmark status in 2001. Additionally, the campus features the Galvin Library (1962), Arthur Keating Hall (1966), and Hermann Hall (1961) by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill and the McCormick Tribune Campus Center (2003) by Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas. 

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