Legendary Architect’s Building Gets Demolished

Known as the ‘Test Cell’ and mostly unknown to, if not all architecture buffs or historians, this little building is undergoing demolition on Chicago’s south side.  Designed by Mies van der Rohe (or at least by someone in his architecture firm) somehow, someone with more time than architectural taste, had decided to make the case for it’s preservation.  Thankfully, this time at least, progress will prevail in order to rebuild a new Metra station at the location.

This is a town where many architectural gems have gone the way of the wrecking ball before the recent call for historical building preservation.  You’d never suspect that a great architect shaped the clunky brick box at the corner of 35th and Federal Streets. But the master of the steel-and-glass box, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, designed this humble brick hut at the southwest edge of the Illinois Institute of Technology.

Only in architecture do we contemplate, and sometimes carry out, the destruction of works by the discipline’s most famous and creative proponents. In other fields, every single thing an artist ever did is worthy of preservation, regardless of quality.  This time, however, it appears that logic will win.