tl dr

Are you an IIT student? Be ware, I'm pretty sure the building has undergone some interal rennovations over the year. I believe originally you could traverse freely from one entrence to the other on the first floor, while now you have make your way through the maze of the materials lab or go up to the second floor and back down again.

Ronco,

Have you ever used a library before?

thanks Synergy...and Make you are so funny, where do you come up with this material? I mean wow, I have not laughed this hard my whole laugh...so funny, just so so funny..."have i ever used a library?" absolutely brilliant material.

well..if you are familiar with libraries i'd say you should look there first then...cause you'll probably have the most luck finding something there. archinect users for the most part don't help out people that are utterly lazy and bring nothing to the discussion/forum.

It's is the comprehensive multi-volume catalog of Mies's drawings. MoMA published it. Franz Schulze and George Danforth were the Editors. Lars is 100% spot on!

lars,

you may be my new idol...

This is both a monolithic building with walls of brick punctuated by steel frames that hold up only themselves and a concrete structure that takes all of the building loads. It is, in this respect, a real dead end. There's no insulation and because Mies rejects layering in the exterior walls, the fact that you see the brick from both sides requires a very high level of craftsmanship. This makes it expensive.

Mies and his desire for "almost nothing" really did a disservice to Architecture students because it is not a realistic way to build in terms of cost or building performance. As Ford has pointed out his Modern Details book, Mies gets this idea into his head that the same building system can be used through a whole scale of work and that this idea comes from a misunderstanding of Medieval Architecture and building practices.

Ronco, have you read Ford's work?

If I recall correctly, I believe the steel lintels at the large windows were undersized. I don't know that Mies would be personally held responsible for that, but I believe it did lead to them deflecting obsessively and having to be replaced.

Deflecting excessively even...