MOVING BEYOND MIES.

The article features the design of the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) by architects Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Alfred Caldwell. The German-born Mies promoted an international modernism with little reference to indigenous materials. Beginning in 1940, Mies would design 18 buildings for IIT and influence thousands of others throughout the world. Caldwell, by contrast, was a local Chicago-area practitioner who is still unknown in the history of American landscape architecture. He was a protege of legendary Chicago landscape architect Jens Jensen. At the IIT campus, Caldwell's abstraction of the Illinois landscape took the form of scattered groves. Through the late 1940s and 1950s, Caldwell worked with native palettes including honey locusts and hackberries.