El McCormick Tribune Campus Center como síndrome. Koolhaas frente a Mies

The McCormick Tribune Campus Center, a Rem Koolhaas building on the IIT campus in Chicago designed by Mies van der Rohe, is an interesting example of the potential for intellectual transmission that its designer bestows on architecture. The 1997 competition rules that led to the commission, completed in 2003, called for “extending Mies’s values ​​to make them relevant in the next century” in a building that “will express the architecture of our time.” In response, Koolhaas offers a building and two complementary texts, Miestakes and Junkspace. Both reflect the epistemic shift that has occurred in the decades since Mies’s work at IIT, under the pressure of the omnipresent globalized market. The unorthodox construction of the McCormick is based on this field of reflection, a strange palimpsest that, beneath a colorful and inconsequential appearance, suggests a stimulating conceptual complexity: in his Letter of Interest for the competition, Koolhaas offers “an exceptional program that will inevitably play a polemical and ideological role.” The physical proximity to Crown Hall—according to Mies, “the clearest structure we have conceived, the one that best expresses our philosophy”—encourages a dialectical analytical approach between the two buildings, strongly focused on the materiality of the built works and their relationship with the urban environment.