Personal Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
American, German; 20th-century
Chicago, IL: 3360 S State Street
83%
S.R. Crown Hall. 1950-1956
This building's magic is how hugely it opens up once you step inside: from an exterior so rhythmic and regular and packed with forms in steady, quiet conversation to an interior that's a rectangled cavern, an image of what "space" as such is that's nevertheless not some Platonic caricature but a subtly accented dynamic negative thing that leaves you feeling, like, incorporated. (Well-placed columns and stairs are what do the accenting.) If Mies has a limitation, it's in how calculated all this can start to seem. Does it lessen the effect of some facade's expansiveness that it divides down into twelve window-sections, each of which divides into three paneled units, each of which... and so on? Maybe. But maybe also those four fins atop the building are jokes about that maniac logicality. (2025)