IIT ARCHITECTURE CHICAGO NOWNESS Is Our Approach
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MASTER OF SCIENCE IN ARCHITECTURE IIT ARCHITECTURE CHICAGO NOWNESS is our approach. One that IIT Architecture Chicago provides a attempts to reach a diverse audience; platform for questioning the architecture one that demonstrates architecture’s discipline at the dawn of a new age, multidisciplinary character; and one that encouraging childlike curiosities to be we hope reflects the depth, originality, explored, and, along the way, reshaping, and differences of our ideas, visions, and rewriting, and rethinking metropolises. perceptions. It is a tool to communicate dreams, presenting our goals to the IIT Architecture focuses on a future of metropolis of Chicago and to the world global urbanism, it remains true to its at large. Cross-disciplinary collaboration legacy as a place of rigorous thinking presents possibilities, encouraging and making. IIT is a place where how a innovation within our own discipline. thing is made matters— whether it be a door, a building, or a city. The IIT Mies We must hypothesize strategies that Campus is a world-famous ensemble of support the development of a new modernist architecture, planning, and environment, while surfing on the landscape design. IIT Architecture is advancements of other disciplines. These housed in Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s new strategies will challenge students masterful S. R. Crown Hall—a National and faculty, allowing for the discovery of Historic Landmark and one of the most multidisciplinary crossroads. “Rethinking significant buildings of the twentieth Metropolis” will be our strategic device. century. We will conduct research; we will analyze existing phenomena; we will learn from new trends. We have to find a new order. We will develop questions about the roles Excerpts from NOWNESS, of architecture and urbanism, and our IITAC Press/ research will speculate on the support Illinois Institute of Technology that new conditions will require. How College of Architecture, 2013 will we invent a new citytype, on a new Wiel Arets city-site, with a new idea of living- Rowe Family College of Architecture working-playing-shopping-relaxing- Dean Endowed Chair learning-communicating? Global urbanization, the proliferation of information technologies, and rapid advances in the human sci- ences are among the most visible trends of the first decades of the twenty-first century. Around the world, habitats continue to evolve into novel “post-city” formations, generating new paradoxes and redefining the role of the architect. As the skilled artificer of the built environment, the architect must come to terms with these new realities. IIT’s new Master of Science in Architecture program positions its investigations in the space opened up between emerging forms of urbanization and existing concepts of architecture, landscape, and cities. Our goal is to develop new and better models for shaping socially, culturally, and ecologically sustainable environments. The discipline of architecture can no longer rely on received ideas, established typologies, or fash- ionable design methodologies. Today the challenge of education at all levels is to embrace our generational transformations, and to engage them in such a way as to create new knowledge. The new Master of Science program provides an intellectual climate in which to reflect upon the forces shaping the contem- porary world and their implications for architecture, landscape, and urbanism. With a dual commitment to research and reality, we are aware of the imposing nature of the problem at hand, as well as of the degree of understanding that is needed simply to measure or fathom its depth. Through design, the program seeks out and experiments with alternative models for constructing the built environment. Engaged with the real-life conditions represented by public authorities, cultural institutions, and private entities, the curriculum insists upon continuous exchange and debate. Vedran Mimica Professor Director of Master of Science in Architecture Program IIT College of Architecture CHICAGO Chicago is a metropolis whose cultural wealth admits few rivals anywhere in the world. The vibrancy and variety of this global city, embodied by its people, history, and architecture, encompass the greatest heights of accomplishment and the bleakest depths of perdition. In the vast space between the glittering skyscrapers of prosperity and the hardscrabble streets of poverty there is no room for quitters in Chicago. The city by the lake is, and always has been, a “city on the make.” Ever since its humble beginnings as a nineteenth-century trading post situated on swampland where the Chicago River fed into Lake Michigan, Chicago has been a perennial destination for the most ambitious, cunning, and visionary individuals—all seeking to make their mark not only on the city, but on the nation and the world. “There is There There” Since the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, one may paraphrase Stein’s Gertrude Stein wrote in Everybody’s famous quote and say that “there Autobiography (New York: Random is there there” in Chicago. John M. House, 1937) after living for decades Binckley will strike an imperial note in Paris, and visiting Oakland, California, in 1873, describing the importance where she spent her childhood, “… of Chicago as emerging economic anyway what was the use of my hub of the Americas: “Chicago is not having come from Oakland it was Eastern, Chicago is not Western. not natural to have come from there Chicago is altogether sui generis….” yes write about it if I like or anything if I like but not there, there is no Chicago has many nicknames: there there.” So, out of context, the “City in a Garden” or “Urbs in Horto” quote “there is no there there” would as its Latin motto on the city seal; the become famous for its ambiguous “Second City” as the informal criticism of anonymity and blandness rivalry with New York City in its sky- of suburban development, as well scraper building boom; “City of the as perhaps tasteless, boring, monoto- Big Shoulders” as in Carl Sandburg’s nous, and banal cultures of suburbia. 1914 poem, “My Kind of Town” One can wonder what she would say, popularized by Frank Sinatra accord- if she would have spent her childhood ing to the lyrics of the song “Chicago” in one of Chicago’s neighborhoods, by Fred Fisher; and “The City That and would be returning from Paris Works” according to former Mayor to the “Paris on the prairie,” as Daniel Richard J. Daley. All of this is signaling Burnham was dreaming what Chicago a powerful urban character develop- could become while drafting the ment in the “middle of nowhere” in Chicago Plan from 1909. only the last century and a half. The Master of Science in Architecture program at MASTER OF SCIENCE IN Illinois Tech is an intensive three-semester program is structured around two design-based research studios. ARCHITECTURE Varying research trajectories each semester is unified by the commitment to forge new models, visions, and principles that better fit with emerging technologies, new biological insights, and the changing nature of the metropolis. An individual thesis project is produced within the basis of the studio along with history/theory seminars and electives. The program seeks to be order to achieve this, the resource for exploring issues of synthetic and interdisciplinary program must be global. crucial importance. in its approach by sharpening critical thinking through col- This global program is espe- Research trajectories will vary laborative and experimental cially well-situated within the each year, but the unifying working processes. ever-transforming metropolis thread will be the commitment of Chicago, a city that provides to forge new models, visions, More inclusive than traditional both the testing ground and and principles that better fit architectural design, yet more the variegated fabric for the with emerging technologies, form- oriented than conven- program’s initiatives. new socio-biological insights, tional urban planning, our and the changing nature of urban design-based research Working with governmental the metropolis. program requires the insights agencies and other public of other disciplines. Striving for interest constituencies as well The goal is to find the right experimental and exploratory as private constituencies, this balance between social and methods demands provocative program will achieve a high economic sustainability on one discourse, distrust of earlier degree of reality and immediacy hand, and, on the other, the approaches, and the creative uncommon within academia, creation of a living environment invention of new forms for while providing partnered in which the individual will housing vitality and life. In agencies with a valuable both prosper and thrive. MASTER OF SCIENCE IN ARCHITECTURE BACHELOR OF Cloud Studios are structured as one- ARCHITECTURE FALL year design-based research platforms that serve as a core for the development COURSES STUDIOS ARCH545: cloud studio 6cr of thesis intention and the thesis design proposal. ELEMENT ARCH588: thesis prep 3cr Fall semster focuses on specific investi- ARCH497+:elective 3cr ELEMENT MASTER OF gations that are pertinent to the changing ELEMENTS MASTER OF LANDSCAPE forms of urbanization where the goal is CORE total 12cr SINGLE to experiment and to test alternative ARCHITECTURE ARCHITECTURE models to provoke new discourse, and SINGLE COURSES STUDIOS COURSES STUDIOS SPRING alternative critical agenda for contempo- rary physical environment. ARCH546: cloud studio 6cr HYBRID ELEMENT ECOLOGY