TROPOLISM

The February issue of Artforum includes an article appraising the renovations of Crown Hall at IIT and Yale University Art Gallery. You'll recall our irritation at the destruction of the original glass from IIT. We haven't seen Crown Hall since its renovation, but we're looking forward to it after reading this article. This kind of attention is why we are architects:

Stopping this spontaneous defenestration (and meeting present-day code) required doubling the glass thickness to half an inch. To hold the extra weight, the “bite” of the stops on the glass needed to be increased from five-eighths of an inch to three-quarters. Great controversy surrounded how this should be done. Simply using thicker stops would make the black steel profile too heavy. The eventual solution was to use stops that tapered from five-eighths on the outside to three-quarters at the point of contact with the glass. This was visually and practically acceptable, but it introduced nonorthogonal planes to Mies’s obsessively rectilinear world; it also meant replacing the original stock steel stops with custom-made ones.