BLOOMINGTON, IN.- Peg Faimon, Dean of Indiana University’s Eskenazi School of Art, Architecture + Design, today announced that the School’s Mies van der Rohe building has opened to students, faculty, and the public for the spring semester. The building, which serves as a shared facility for the School, is the realization of a recently rediscovered 1952 design that Mies created for the Bloomington campus. The design has been sensitively adapted for contemporary use by the architectural team of Thomas Phifer and Partners. Lecture, workshop, student collaboration, administrative and office program spaces are included.

Originally commissioned for an IU chapter of the Pi Lambda Phi fraternity, which subsequently abandoned the project, the Mies design was all but forgotten for some sixty years. It re-emerged in 2013 when Sidney Eskenazi, a member of the former chapter, informed IU’s then-President Michael A. McRobbie of the existence of Mies’s drawings for the building. Following a trail of rediscovery, IU found documentation of the project in the archives of the Art Institute of Chicago and New York’s Museum of Modern Art. In 2019, IU announced that it would realize the 10,000-square-foot, two-story building, paying for construction with a portion of a $20 million donation from Sidney and Lois Eskenazi.

The 60-foot-wide, 140-foot-long building is made principally of thin, white-painted steel and expansive glass in panes measuring 10 feet square, with select gray limestone and white epoxy terrazzo. Floor-to-ceiling windows wrap around the entire second story, which features a central exterior square atrium, giving the impression of transparency throughout the building. Much of the lower level is open to the air, with the second or main story elegantly elevated above the ground plane. Architecturally, the building has a strong relationship to both the contemporaneous Farnsworth House and the massing and form of many of Mies’s early concepts for buildings at the Illinois Institute of Technology. Select furnishings designed by Mies and Florence Knoll, respectively, have been chosen to complement the building’s design and era.

Peg Faimon said, “We are thrilled to mark the opening of the Mies Building, which will enable faculty and students of all our School’s programs to come together and collaborate. Just as important, this magnificent building shows who we are, representing the excellence to which we are committed. There can be no greater inspiration for us than to learn and work in a masterpiece by this titan of twentieth-century architecture. Let us hope that it will be a lasting monument to the power of collaborations and connections of all kinds—artistic, creative, intellectual and, above all, human.”

To celebrate the realization of the building, the Eskenazi School will hold a public open house and reception on April 8, 2022. There will also be an invitation-only panel discussion on the background and design of the building and the history of Mies’s work in Indiana. Moderated by Adam Thies, Indiana University Associate Vice President, Capital Planning & Facilities, the panel will include Steve Dayton, Project Architect, Thomas Phifer and Partners; Ron Johnson, Structural Engineer, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM); and Edward Windhorst, Mies van der Rohe’s biographer.

Thomas Phifer and Partners is also the architect for IU’s new Ferguson International Center, currently under construction directly across North Eagleson Avenue from the Mies building of the Eskenazi School.