Rem Koolhaas and the folks at OMA designed this student center for IIT in Chicago a few years ago. As is the case in many OMA projects, a variety of external forces, real or imaginary, informs one striking formal gesture. In this case, a broad single story building was conceived to occupy maximum campus area, as a way to achieve long term urbanistic goals established in the 1940s by Mies van der Rohe. The existing elevated train, which had been an overwhelming source of noise in the past, is housed in a shiny metal tube to help mitigate the sound. The result of these two forces is downward pressure on the building form.
Like in the Mestia Airport project, the primitive form seems to be drawn from a preconceived idea of the single-story, metal and glass clad modernist structure. The material rules that have been established in the primitive are challenged by this downward force from the train-tube. The end result is the outward appearance of a modernist building being crushed. While this may seem like an unappealing condition at first, OMA is able craft a rich and organic interior with a lot of welcomed sectional drama.
Source: OMA website
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