From Denver to Chicago: Racial Geographies and the Enduring Underside of Miesian Modernism

Leen Katrib Graham Foundation Grant Abstract In the 1970s, during a growing liberation movement that resisted the racial dispossession of Colorado’s Chicano community, a group of Mies van der Rohe’s disciples from the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) became instrumental in the design and planning of Denver’s Auraria Campus expansion—a master plan that united three institutions in the erasure of Auraria’s Chicano community. While the Auraria Campus has not merited the same scholarly attention as Mies’s design for IIT’s campus expansion into Chicago’s Bronzeville neighborhood, it necessarily provokes the question of influence as Mies’s disciples coalesced to explicitly cite and adapt Miesian principles onto a Hispanic context. This ongoing project traces the flow of influence from the later disciples back to the precursor modernist master’s pedagogy and practice at IIT to propose a revision to the historiography of Miesian modernism that points to its longer shadows of influence on racial geographies across the American landscape.