Home of the Illinois Institute of Technology's College of Architecture, Crown Hall is often counted the finest of the roughly twenty buildings Ludwig Mies van der Rohe designed for the IIT campus, where he led the architecture program from 1938 to 1958.
The building is one great room, 120 by 220 feet, enclosed in steel and glass. Four steel plate girders pass above the roof and carry it from outside, so the main floor needs no interior columns at all. Mies called this kind of open, adaptable room "universal space," and students still work here in a single shared studio.
Crown Hall was dedicated in 1956 and named for the businessman S. R. Crown after a gift from his brothers. It became a National Historic Landmark in 2001, and a 2005 restoration repainted its steel black and replaced its glass.
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