McCormick Tribune Campus Center

Illinois Institute of Technology McCormick Tribune Campus Center
MTCC
McCormick Tribune Campus Center, from the northwest
General information
Type	Student union
Opened	2003
Technical details
Floor count	1
Design and construction
Architect	Rem Koolhaas
Website
http://www.iit.edu/campus_and_conference_centers/services/mtcc.shtml

The McCormick Tribune Campus Center (MTCC) is a building on the main campus of the Illinois Institute of Technology, in the Bronzeville neighborhood on the south side of Chicago. The McCormick Tribune Campus Center opened September 30, 2003. A single-story 110,000-square-foot (10,000 m²) building, it was the first building designed by architect Rem Koolhaas within the United States.

Design of the building began in 1997 during an international architectural design competition hosted by the school. Finalists included Peter Eisenman, Helmut Jahn, Zaha Hadid, Kazuyo Sejima, and the winner, Rem Koolhaas. He worked with Chicago architecture firm Holabird & Root, especially on structural engineering issues.

The site was previously a heavily used student parking lot with tracks of the elevated train passing overhead. Koolhaas tracked movements of students across the lot, which led to diagonal passageways as the center's interior thoroughfares. Campus functions which had been spread around campus, such as the student bookstore and a post office, were relocated between these pathways. They also connected to a new cafeteria in a renovated 1953 Commons building designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Creating this connection involved battles with believers in the purity of Mies's designs who wished the Commons to continue to stand alone.

A major design challenge was the noise of the public transit tracks passing over the lot. The solution was to enclose a 530-foot (160 m) section of the tracks in a stainless steel tube passing over the building. The tube's support structure is completely independent of the building's, to minimize vibration passing between them.

Even grander plans had once been in store for this site. Koolhaas's firm, the Office for Metropolitan Architecture hoped to develop a retail corridor along 33rd Street, at the southern edge of the lot. Budget constraints precluded this, however. Original designs included a bowling alley, basketball courts and a skate park, but these were removed from the final design, supposedly because of security concerns.