Architectural Record, November 2022

In Chicago, Dirk Denison Renovates Mies-Designed Dorms at IIT

Buildings by Modernist master Mies van der Rohe have reached an age where they may require rehabilitation. Recent examples include alterations to the 1972 Martin Luther King Jr. Library in Washington, D.C., by Mecanoo and to the 1968 Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin by David Chipperfield. Both projects involved painstaking restoration. In Chicago, for the $70 million makeover of three dormitories, which form a quadrangle at the northeast corner of the Mies-designed campus of the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT), architect Dirk Denison took a different approach.

“A reliable preservation motto,” says architectural historian Michelangelo Sabatino, who, like Denison, teaches at IIT, “is repair, don’t replace.” But Denison and project architect Justin DeGroff, working in a design-build partnership with Gilbane Building Company and guided by the Commission on Chicago Landmarks, determined that little beyond the painted concrete frames and brick-clad elevator cores could be salvaged. “We recognized,” says Denison, “that we needed to go beyond preservation into what we’ve been calling ‘heritage renovation.’ Our first and most crucial decision was to set a constraint: we would maintain the exterior appearance in line with Mies’s design intent.”

Check out the article here.