Open House Chicago: ID & the Kaplan Institute at Illinois Tech

Saturday, October 15, 10am–5pm

Sunday, October 16, 10am–5pm

Check out the newest building Illinois Tech's Mies van der Rohe campus, now host to ID@85: 85 Years of Making the Future. The Mies campus in Bronzeville was entered into the National Register of Historic Places in 2005 and is home to the largest concentration of Mies buildings in the world. The 70,000-square-foot Kaplan Institute for Innovation and Tech Entrepreneurship was designed by award-winning Chicago architect John Ronan and is home to the Institute of Design (ID).

Peruse 85 years of design artifacts and stories from ID, home to the US's sole graduate-only school for design as it celebrates its its 85th year. ID@85: 85 Years of Making the Future features the stories of design greats, famous or yet unknown—including ID founder Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, lecturer Buckminster Fuller, Sears executive Charles Harrison, and Equitable Healthcare Action Lab Director Kim Erwin—as the Institute of Design (ID) shapeshifts into its next chapter.

The second floor of the LEED Gold building, inspired by the work of Mies van der Rohe, is home to the Institute of Design, cantilevers over the ground floor to provide sun shading, and is enclosed in a dynamic façade of ETFE (Ethylene Tetrafluoroethylene) foil cushions, the first use of its kind in Chicago. Through sophisticated pneumatics, the façade can vary the amount of solar energy entering the building. At one percent the weight of glass, ETFE gives the building a light, cloud-like appearance.