McCormick Tribune Campus Center

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McCormick Tribune Campus Center, from the northwest

McCormick Tribune Campus Center, from the southwest

The McCormick Tribune Campus Center was designed as an architecturally-significant addition to the already architecturally-significant main campus of the Illinois Institute of Technology, located in the Bronzeville neighborhood on the south side of Chicago.

The McCormick Tribune Campus Center, or the MTCC, opened September 30, 2003 as the first building designed by notable architect Rem Koolhaas within the United States. It is a single-story 110,000 square foot (10,000 m²) building.

Design of the building actually began in 1997 during an international architectural design competition hosted by the school. Finalists included Peter Eisenman, Helmut Jahn, Zaha Hadid, Kazuyo Sejima, and the winner, Rem Koolhaas. He worked together with Chicago architecture firm Holabird & Root, especially on structural engineering issues.

The site was previously merely a parking lot heavily trafficked by students over which the tracks of the noisy Chicago El pass. An important aspect of Koolhaas's design concept was to track the movement of students across the lot, which informed the set of diagonal passageways that were ultimately built to serve as the center's interior thoroughfares. Between these pathways were included a number of campus functions, which had previously been spread around campus, such as the student bookstore and the campus post office. Also involved was a connection to the new campus cafeteria, to be created in a renovated version of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's 1953 Commons building. The process of creating this connection involved significant architectural sensitivity in design and battles with believers in the purity of van der Rohe's designs that wished the Commons to continue to stand alone.

A southbound Green Line train passing through the stainless steel tube shielding the McCormick Tribune Campus Center. Formerly nicknamed the BUTT for "Building Under The Tracks", but now more commonly referred to as "MTCC"

A major design challenge was what to do with the noise of the public transit tracks passing through the lot. The ultimate solution to this problem was to enclose a 530 foot (160 m) long section of the tracks in a stainless steel tube passing over the building. Interesting to note is that the tube's support structure is completely independent of the building's, in order to minimize vibration passing between the trains and the building.

Even grander plans had once been in store for this building. An important belief of Koolhaas's firm, the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, is in the power of commerce to help revitalize a neighborhood. Therefore, originally it had been hoped to develop a retail corridor along 33rd Street, at the southern edge of the lot. Budget constraints precluded this, however. The original designs were also said to include a bowling alley, basketball courts and a skate park, but these were removed from the final design, supposedly because of security concerns. Other interesting might-have-beens include State Street being paved in aluminum, and the whole building receiving a wooden roof.

The original project budget was $25 million, but the ultimate cost of the project was $48 million. However, the price held lesser priority than the university's need to create an architecturally-significant building to add onto its original main campus, which is the densest concentration anywhere of buildings designed by the architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. One month earlier, a residence hall designed by also notable Helmut Jahn a block away made this the second in a set of modern buildings to open on IIT's campus, the first new buildings since 1971.