MIES VAN DER ROHE’S PROPOSAL FOR THE URBAN SPACE OF THE CONVENTION HALL

Abstract

The Convention Hall proposed by Mies van der Rohe for the city of Chicago has been a much-referenced project by historians and critics who have studied his work. Its clarity, dimensions and structure, or rather its non-structure, have been recurrent themes of reflection. However, there is one aspect of his architecture in general and of this project in particular that has received little attention: the urban design process capable of accommodating this enormous space. The Convention Hall was not only important because of its scale, but also because it was to contribute to the urban regeneration of an area on the south side of Chicago in keeping with the guidelines of the Burnham Plan of 1909. The infrastructure was inaugurated in 1960, discarding Mies’ proposal, and the project of his former assistant Gene Summers, who worked for the firm C.F. Murphy, was built. This article explores the design process and the formal relationship between the filling -the building- and the empty -urban space- of Mies’ proposal which, despite not being built, continues to provide valid considerations for today’s cities. To do so, the plans and documents in the archive are analysed and compared, both for the proposal presented by Mies and for the studies that he continued to develop with his students at the IIT. Mies never really gave up on seeing his longed-for universal space built. The question arises as to whether the essence of the Convention Hall was a building or simply an urban space.