Eskenazi School of Art Architecture + Design, a Mies van der Rohe design

The building will provide spaces for lectures, workshops, student collaborations and offices and will be a complement on the Bloomington campus to the School’s J. Irwin Miller Architecture Program, housed in Columbus, Indiana, in the former Republic Newspaper building designed by Myron Goldsmith of Skidmore, Ownings and Merrill, an employee of Mies in 1952 when the IU project was in design.

Location

Northwest corner of Seventh Street and Jordan Avenue on the IU Bloomington campus, near the Herman B. Wells Library, the Fine Arts Building, the Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies and the new Ferguson International Center (under construction, designed by Thomas Phifer and Partners).

History

In 1950, Indianapolis businessmen Joseph Cantor and Harry Berke invited Mies to Bloomington to discuss his designing a house for a fraternity at IU, the Alpha Theta chapter of Pi Lambda Phi. Cantor previously had commissioned Mies to design a residence and a drive-in restaurant (both unbuilt). Mies accepted the fraternity commission, designing it with the same white steel and glass structure as he used in the contemporaneous Farnsworth House. By 1953, however, the fraternity found itself unable to raise the funds for the building, and by 1957 the project was abandoned.

In 1985, the former president of the fraternity, Allan Kwitney, died, and his widow discovered a set of blueprints among his possessions. She transferred them to the fraternity’s former treasurer, Alan Kleinman, who eventually donated the blueprints to the Mies archive at The Museum of Modern Art. The project was not represented in MoMA’s 14-volume catalogue raisonné of Mies’s American work, 1938-1967, published in 1993.

In 2013, businessman, former fraternity brother and IU alumnus and donor Sidney Eskenazi informed IU’s then-President Michael McRobbie of the Mies drawings in his possession. McRobbie notified his planning team. In 2015, Adam Thies went to the Ryerson and Burnham Libraries at the Art Institute of Chicago to conduct research for the planning team. There, in the papers of Mies’s associate Daniel Brenner, he found a folder with significant documentation. IU subsequently contacted architect Dirk Lohan, FAIA, grandson of Mies, who agreed that the University could use the design and attribute it to Mies.

In August 2019, IU announced the intention to construct the Mies design as the shared central facility for the Eskenazi School.

Design Adaptations

To enable the Mies design to conform to today’s building code and suit it to its new academic function, Thomas Phifer and Partners has adapted the plans while maintaining their structural and aesthetic integrity.

To comply with life-safety codes, a stair was added at the west end within the original volume and the original open stair at the east end has been modified. A hydraulic elevator was added for ADA accessibility.

The building is equipped with a fan-coil heating and cooling system (new), radiant floor heating per the original design, and a central fresh- air ventilation system (new). The original single-pane clear glass is replaced by insulating, high-performance glass to comply with the Indiana State Energy Code. As required by IU facilities standards, wet and dry pipe sprinkler systems have been added. The ground-floor plan has been reconfigured for code-compliant egress and expanded mechanical room. The second-floor layout of rooms is largely intact, re-purposed from dorm rooms to offices. The original sub-division of the open east end with curtains has been removed. Restrooms have been reconfigured to meet plumbing occupancy code and ADA accessibility.