Architecture Professor Leen Katrib is revolutionizing how students learn about modernist master Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, teaching them to reject his example due to the architect's problematic racial legacy in America. Katrib, an assistant professor at the University of Kentucky, has spent three years developing a critical revision of van der Rohe's work, particularly focusing on how his celebrated campus designs displaced Black and minority communities.
Katrib first encountered van der Rohe as an undergraduate in the early 2010s, initially viewing him as "a disciplinary anchor" whose work helped situate contemporary architecture. She embarked on an architectural pilgrimage to visit his most famous works: New York's Seagram Building, the Barcelona Pavilion, Farnsworth House in Plano, Illinois, and Crown Hall at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) in Chicago, where van der Rohe served as director from 1939 to 1958.
At IIT, van der Rohe was given an unprecedented opportunity to design a new campus master plan, all institutional buildings, and a new architectural curriculum. The campus became one of the world's largest collections of his buildings. However, Katrib's perspective changed dramatically when she discovered the hidden history behind Crown Hall's construction while designing a university building herself.
A few years ago, Katrib came across a report about objects recovered during a tunnel repair near Crown Hall. These artifacts belonged to Mecca Flats, a hotel-turned-residence built in 1892 that held significant cultural importance during Chicago's Black Renaissance. The building featured a generously lit glass-roof atrium and vibrant, publicly accessible open courtyards that fostered an active communal life. This cultural hub inspired "The Mecca Flat Blues" by jazz composer Jimmy Blythe and "In the Mecca" by poet Gwendolyn Brooks.
Despite a decade of fierce resistance from tenants, Mecca Flats was demolished in 1952 to make way for Crown Hall. Vast sections of Chicago's Bronzeville neighborhood were leveled as part of the larger urban renewal project that enabled IIT's campus expansion. While this backstory was known to architectural and cultural historians and Bronzeville's Black community, it remained unknown to many students who were taught to revere van der Rohe's contributions solely through "terms of rigorous order, proportion, structural clarity and material honesty."
Katrib now leads efforts to critically examine the racial impact of higher education's expanding built environment and the architects behind these projects. She has installed traveling exhibitions at several institutions to bring this hidden history to both architectural and general audiences, deconstructing the methods used to elevate narratives of architectural genius while ignoring displaced people and histories.
"It's deeply problematic that I only learned the full story behind Mies' IIT campus through a chance encounter with a news article about an archaeological find," Katrib explains. She argues that framing the campus solely through van der Rohe's mastery of proportion and detail fails to explain modernism's enduring influence on racial geographies across the American landscape.
While other campus designs have bulldozed communities, including those at University of Pennsylvania, Columbia University's Manhattanville campus, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, and University of Southern California, none is as strongly linked to its architect as van der Rohe is to IIT. The IIT campus defined campus planning by being one of the country's first federally funded post-war urban renewal campus expansions.
Katrib clarifies that there is no evidence suggesting van der Rohe was racist, nor is she drawing that conclusion. In fact, the few Black students who attended IIT in the 1940s and 1950s reported a supportive environment that treated them equally with white classmates. Instead, van der Rohe was "famously indifferent about race" – a common position among architects of his time that cast architecture as a politically neutral act of creative expression.
This indifference is evident in a famous 1941 photomontage where van der Rohe simply superimposed a photograph of the proposed campus model onto an aerial photograph of Bronzeville. The campus sits on a raised white plinth in defiance of its place in Chicago's Black Belt. In many of his other architectural representations, context is similarly absent, and his students generated proposals that likewise avoided representing or integrating existing context.
Van der Rohe's legacy extends beyond Chicago. His Lafayette Park residential campus in Detroit stands on the bulldozed traces of the Black Bottom community. Katrib recently received a Graham Foundation grant to investigate a similarly problematic campus expansion at Auraria Campus in Denver, which will mark its 50th anniversary next year – 50 years since more than 300 Chicano families were evicted and their community demolished to expand a campus uniting three higher education institutions near downtown Denver. The designers were former disciples of van der Rohe.
Biographers of van der Rohe have either ignored his work's impact on Black communities or rationalized his indifference as general detachment from the human condition. This neutral reading was partly shaped by van der Rohe's own 1924 declaration that "questions of a general nature are of central interest. The individual becomes less and less important; his fate no longer interests us."
Revising such an established legacy doesn't come easily, and Katrib acknowledges that "the list of Mies apologists is long." However, she argues that training future architects to focus solely on building design without critically assessing long-term community impact risks perpetuating a built environment that reinforces systemic inequities. Such re-examinations are particularly crucial given recent political threats against efforts to reconsider American history through the lens of race.
As an educator, Katrib reminds her students that architects have a responsibility to acknowledge architecture's racial underside and advocate for redress for impacted communities. She points to concrete examples of institutional restitution, such as Colorado's House Bill 22-1393, which perpetually extends the "Displaced Aurarian Scholarship" to descendants of displaced Chicano families, and an NEH-funded effort by University of Colorado Denver faculty to examine Auraria's history.
Katrib suggests that Illinois and IIT should consider similar measures for displaced Bronzeville residents and their descendants. She also calls on professional organizations like the American Institute of Architects (AIA) to reject university commissions that don't responsibly integrate community members into the design process. "The next generation of architects should see the welfare, safety and success of community members as part of their mission," she concludes. "That would be a legacy to be proud of."
