[ Lost in the Landscape ]

hanging garden

These are the last of my Chicago tourist archi­tec­ture pho­tos, all taken on the cam­pus of the Illi­nois Insti­tute of Technology.

One of the two build­ings we looked at in detail is the recently com­pleted Tri­bune Stu­dent Cen­ter, which is located directly under­neath the ele­vated rail that cuts through cam­pus. Most archi­tects would have con­sid­ered the site a dis­as­ter and likely would have shied away from the project. Rem Kool­haas, archi­tect of the Seat­tle Pub­lic Library and some other recent high-profile projects, took the loca­tion as a chal­lenge and swooped in with a solu­tion so amaz­ing it makes your head spin.

Noise and vibra­tion would be the worst part of liv­ing below the tracks. But what would hap­pen if you made a big bur­rito of the train by wrap­ping the rail over­head in steel and con­crete? And what if you put holes in the top of the tube to direct the noise up to the sky? Here’s a shot of the exte­rior show­ing the tube and one side of the stu­dent center.

Inside, the cen­ter is a busy con­cen­tra­tion of col­lid­ing lines and angles. And when a train passes over­head, you can still notice it. Only, it sounds more like a home heater turn­ing on instead of a jet tak­ing off.

One lit­tle piece of repose inside is what Kool­haas has dubbed the hang­ing gar­den. Part bridge, part green roof, this long rec­tan­gle planted with grasses brings light inside and intro­duces some nature into the dark world of indus­trial surfaces.

Green roofs are by def­i­n­i­tion on the roof, so you don’t usu­ally get to engage them as directly as you do here. Drop­ping the roof down like this was almost as bril­liant as wrap­ping the over­head rail­way in a tube. Unfor­tu­nately, this is the only part of the struc­ture that uses any­thing resem­bling a green roof.

Here you see the hang­ing gar­den hov­er­ing over the tables of the cafe­te­ria. It’s a lit­tle hard mak­ing it out in the pic­ture, but it’s also a lit­tle hard teas­ing apart all the angles when you’re there in real life. This isn’t an archi­tec­ture that’s all about clar­ity and purity and minimalism.

Although it isn’t remotely botan­i­cal, I enjoyed this other lit­tle detail. An entrance into the stu­dent cen­ter goes through this big por­trait of Lud­wig Mies van der Rohe, mod­ern mas­ter of clar­ity and purity and min­i­mal­ism. To enter on this side, you approach the por­trait, the auto­matic sen­sor notices your pres­ence, Mies’s mouth opens to let you in, and then pro­ceeds to shut tight behind you to swal­low you whole. Yum yum. (I’m not sure Kool­haas thinks highly of Mies’s work…)

Here’s an over­head shot of the whole cen­ter, based on the aer­ial photo at Live Search Maps:

Return­ing to things def­i­nitely botan­i­cal, here’s a lit­tle plant­ing of birches next door to the Kool­haas build­ing, at Hel­mut Jahn’s stu­dent hous­ing struc­ture. Whether it’s a mod­ern plant­ing like this or a clus­ter in a res­i­den­tial front yard, there seems to be some­thing about birches that makes peo­ple want to plant sev­eral of them together. Why is that?

Would a sin­gle birch look totally wrong? Would it be ask­ing a sin­gle tree to stand in for an entire for­est? Is this one of our unques­tioned social con­ven­tions, or would a sin­gle birch sim­ply be too trans­par­ent to hold its own? I’ll have to pay more atten­tion next time I run across more birches…

While you’re pon­der­ing this ques­tion, check out the land­scap­ing done at Renzo Piano’s Rue de Meaux pub­lic hous­ing project in Paris which uses many oodles of birches in its court­yards. This design doesn’t clus­ter the trees by twos and threes, but it sure does use a small for­est of them. [ Image by lau­ra­knosp via Flikr ]

March 06 2009 | Categories: gardening • landscape design • places | Tags: architecture • birch trees • Illinois Institute of Technology • Rem Koolhaas | 7 Comments »