Finding Order in Chaos

 

Look at this. What a mess, you say. One color blotch after another, no repetition of forms, no pattern, no order of any kind.
Look again. There’s a black vertical line right in the middle(yellow arrows) If you draw a horizontal line through its top end, you get a golden section (green). If you draw a line through the bottom end point of the black line, you get a golden section (purple). You have to be pretty desperate to find some structure here to do this exercise and you have to be fond of the golden section. I happen to enjoy looking for structure and I’m besotted with the golden section. But that’s all I can come up with here.
Now, aside from the hunt for the golden section, reconsider the mess. Look yet again. If you look closely, if you zoom in, you can find exquisite passages. Here are some. Imagine each as a new painting.——————————————————————————

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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The painting as a whole was incomprehensible and hard to look at—as a whole. But it consists of potential paintings that are quite dynamic and, at the same time, orderly.
Painting by Bruce Boyer, oil on canvas, 40” x 30”
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Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

When you Google something today, you’ll see a line drawing of Crown Hall.  Bravo, Google!

Crown Hall is the Architecture building at the Illinois Institute of Technology, designed in the mid 1950’s by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who was born on this day in 1886.  The building often houses architecture exhibits and art events.  It’s well worth the trip to just be in this building.

Gandhi, when asked what he thought of Western civilization, replied “I think it would be a great idea.”  He died a few years before Crown Hall went up.  Too bad.  He might have had an aha-moment in this exhilarating, optimistic space.  He would have noticed the clarity of its thought.

The Main Building of what was then the Armory Institute of Technology was built by Patton & Fisher in 1893, the year of the Columbian Exposition.  You see it every time you drive down the Dan Ryan.  It’s Romanesque Revival and was cut from the same fearful cloth as all the gloppy grandeur down at the Midway Plaisance that year.  The powers-that-were apparently trembled at the changes– social, political, cultural, technological, spiritual, the works– that were in the air and exploded in the early decades of the 20^th century.  Louis Sullivan was part of that change and his Transportation Building at the Fair was the only progressive structure there.  Poor Louis, came to a tragic end.

The 20^th century turned a corner, any way you think of corner, metaphorically or technologically.  No wonder, “how to turn a corner”  became a major topic of discussion among architects.

Mies turned a profound corner.

Gandhi might have been drawn to sit in meditation in Mies’s chapel, which looks inconspicuous, without grandeur, affectation or cowardly historical revivalism.  The chapel at IIT looks more like a factory, a little workshop, a cubicle even, a place where you go to work on your stuff.

(Above, my caricature of Mies, 1986, when I was a docent with the Chicago Architecture Foundation and gave the Loop tours and the Boat Tour with great passion and the occasional quip about the powers-that-be, but you already guessed that.  )

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