Reparations: The Other Mies Archive

This ongoing subversive archival project re-examines the history of modernist architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s design for the Illinois Institute of Technology’s postwar campus expansion, which led to the strategic erasure of a primarily Black neighborhood in Chicago’s South Side. Conceived as an archival apparatus, the installation deconstructs the official campus history and complicates the architect’s legacy, which rarely diverges from a discussion about form and architectural ideology, by inviting visitors to peek into the material record that was necessarily suppressed to create the myth of a tabula rasa created by an architect intent on creating an “apolitical” architecture in the name of progress.