Days of mid-century modern past at IU Bloomington
On move-in day, when dropping my daughter off at IU Bloomington where she is a freshman, I was struck by a new campus building of white-painted steel, floor-to-ceiling windows, and gray limestone. It is named after the German-born architect Mies van der Rohe, commonly referred to as Mies.
Much of the lower level is open to the air. Its upper-level offices and conference rooms surround a central exterior atrium. The building is based on a design that Mies drew up in the early 1950s.
Originally conceived to house a Pi Lambda Phi fraternity, it wasn’t built at that time despite the plans having received considerable press from the Indianapolis Star and elsewhere.
“Ultra modern and functional, America’s most unusual fraternity house will rise next summer on the Bloomington campus of Indiana University,” cooed the Star on Feb. 10, 1952. “[Mies’] chief architectural aim is to design buildings that give an outdoors atmosphere…”
The blueprints for the building lay gathering dust for some 70 years, but the plans were revived when philanthropist and real estate developer Sidney Eskenazi, who was a member of the IU chapter of Pi Lambda Phi, mentioned this history to the former president of IU Michael McRobbie in 2013. The rediscovered blueprints were adapted and adjusted for contemporary use by the architecture firm Thomas Phifer and Partners, and construction was bankrolled by a $20 million gift from Sidney and Lois Eskenazi.
The building opened to the public in February, 2022, not as a frat house, but as a multipurpose academic hall as part of IU’s Eskenazi School of Art, Architecture, and Design.
Imagine, however, if the Mies building had been designed as a fraternity house back in the 1950s. Imagine looking directly through all that glass into a frat boy’s lit bedroom at midnight, to see said frat boy having sex with a sorority girl.
According to Adam Thies, writing in the Indianapolis Monthly, it was a mix of financial troubles and lackluster fundraising that ultimately doomed the frat house project. But I wonder if more practical considerations were at play, like wanting to keep indoor activities indoors.
Thies, who is associate vice president of capital planning and design at Indiana University, co-curated the exhibition Mies in Indiana, open through Nov. 12, at the Grunwald Gallery in the Eskenazi School of Art, Architecture, and Design. The exhibit gives a good overview of Mies the designer and architect, one of the modernists who grew to prominence in Weimar Germany—who became the last director of the Bauhaus, before the Nazis shut it down in 1933. After immigrating to the United States, he designed a number of iconic buildings, including the Seagram Building in New York, the residential towers of 860-880 Lake Shore Dr. in Chicago, and the Chicago Federal Center complex.
But the main thrust of the exhibition, telegraphed by the title, is on his work on various projects in Indiana. There is a lovely film playing on rotation of the new Mies building, along with many photographs. There is a blow-up of an architectural sketch of the project, which takes up an entire wall. In front of that drawing, are the original project blueprints, on a table under glass, like the sacred text of some ancient, esoteric religion.
We see the designs, drawings, and photos of scale models in this exhibit. But we don’t see that many photos of actual buildings, because so many of them were not built, invariably due to cost considerations. Those never-built projects include an office building that was conceived for the corner of Meridian and Michigan Streets in Indianapolis, and an apartment building envisioned for 3675 N. Meridian Street. Perhaps the most notable never-built Mies building was the Cantor Drive-In Restaurant, which like so many other Mies projects, was to consist of a bare steel frame and walls of plate glass.
In his article, Thies notes the connection between Indianapolis film distributor Joseph Cantor, who commissioned the Drive-In, and the derailed Phi Lambda Pi frat house project, before launching into the following lament:
What would have happened had the Cantor Drive-In Restaurant been built in 1947 in Indy? The Berke apartment building in 1953? In a way, elements of them were built. Look closely at the designs of local office buildings and apartments of the mid century—Mies’s influence is everywhere in structures from that era. Unfortunately, few had the ability to deliver the master architect’s carefully refined buildings, and often the result was what so many dislike about modernism: bland, soulless design.
Could Mies’ mid-century modern designs have been too refined for the Hoosier State? Bare steel and glass make sense for skyscrapers on Park Avenue or on the Magnificent Mile. They also make sense on a smaller scale for the residences he actually built. But, again, I wonder about the practicality of some of his designs that were deemed too expensive to build at the time they were originally conceived.
The big question for me is whether the new Mies structure will work out, now that it’s built. It serves as a wonderful aesthetic statement, I suppose, but there’s no getting past the fact that it is a small building on a large campus. What if the dean of the art school needs more classroom space and realizes, Oh fuck, we can’t really build more stories on top of the Mies building now, can we?
About four years ago, working as an Uber driver, I drove a retiree from the Indianapolis International Airport, which is something of an architectural marvel, to his house in Zionsville. While passing the Pyramids Office Park, designed by Kevin Roche, the man told me how impractical the Pyramids were as originally conceived, how the exterior glass of the building had to be replaced. The man was a contractor who had worked on air conditioning and heating in various modernist buildings and he said that quite often it was his job to retrofit for buildings where the architects made no allowances for anything but aesthetics. He was particularly critical of the architects like Roche, whose buildings in the Columbus, Indiana area are so often fetishized.
Maybe he had a point.
I am, by the way, a great fan of Exhibit Columbus, and their cycles of festivals and conferences celebrating design and architecture. (Their symposium will take place Oct. 21-22.) But the whole point of these exercises is to encourage and engage the architecture of the future, not to dwell on the played out mid-century modern aesthetic. Ultimately I wonder if Thies, who worked as the director of metropolitan development of Indianapolis between 2012 and 2015—who started his career in Chicago—is looking backward rather than forward. When noting, in his article, about Indiana having a reputation for lackluster architecture—with the exception of Columbus—he never mentions the luminous Evans Woollen extension on the Central Library in downtown Indy or the Eskenazi Hospital with its rooftop garden and its reputation for environmental sustainability. He never mentions the Cummins Indianapolis Distribution Headquarters, where the architect Deborah Berke achieved both a striking design and a lessening of the building’s environmental footprint.
Let me back up a bit and say I’m not a hater. I like some aspects of the new Mies building, which unquestioningly lives up to the architect’s “less is more” dictum. It also provides a contrast to some of the more severe-looking buildings on campus, including the Herman B. Wells Library and the (main) Eskenazi School of Art, Architecture and Design building, both of which are largely without windows.
“I’m not sure I like this windowless aesthetic,” my graphic designer daughter told me as we walked through campus, on her first day as a campus resident. I take her point, yet there’s something to be said aesthetically for those brutal (if not quite brutalist) walls of limestone—at least from the outside. From the inside, my hunch is that the claustrophobia of those enclosed spaces starts to diminish any possible practical benefit gained from the prison-like designs but I could be wrong.
The question in contemporary architecture—as in so many things in life—is where to find a happy medium.
