Features

Summer 2007

Smash Bash and the Renovation of S. R. Crown Hall

In 1997, Krueck and Sexton Architects first became professionally involved with President Lew Collens and IIT by doing a feasibility study for the renovation of S. R. Crown Hall. I can say that Lew has been literally a mover and a shaker who has taken as his own Daniel Burnham’s...

Summer 2007

Building Downtown Campus

My first significant experience with Lew Collens was during the construction of the new Downtown Campus for Chicago-Kent College of Law, which he initiated when he was dean of Chicago-Kent. The strategy was simple. Moving the school to a larger, state-of-the-art, computer-friendly building in the West Loop would allow Chicago-Kent...

Summer 2007

Building University Technology Park At IIT

IIT’s 1996 Main Campus Master Plan called for a “commercial zone” on the south end of campus. In 2000, as the City of Chicago decided to move its new police headquarters to near Main Campus and to take down public housing around IIT, President Lew Collens said, “Let’s do a...

Summer 2007

The IIT Challenge Campaign

When I joined IIT in 1994, it was in the midst of a long-range planning effort, the National Commission for IIT. Led by President Lew Collens and Bob Galvin, and staffed by David Baker, the charge of the commission was to envision a future that would successfully set the university...

Summer 2007

Why Robert Pritzker and I made our large gifts to the university in 1996

There were two main reasons why Robert Pritzker and I made our large gifts to the university in 1996. It started with our spirit of confidence that in President Lew Collens, IIT had the prospect of real leadership. This leadership proved to be the reality, for which we felt there...

Summer 2007

My Interview with Lew Collens

In 1990, I was chairman of the Board of Trustees and also headed the search committee to hire IIT’s new president. When I interviewed Lew Collens, an internal candidate for the job, I wanted to quiz him in the same way that I would an outsider, so that there would...

Fall 2006

Bringing It Home

The outsourcing of millions of manufacturing jobs across borders and overseas is a largely American recipe. A look at the causes, effects, and how IIT is helping to counter this trend. America is a land of things. Multiplying by the hour, a blizzard of manufactured goods has become an inescapable...

Fall 2006

Students Rally for the Bog

First it was built on Ogden Bog, then it was “The Bog,” then it became storage space for emergency water (which, when the water spilled out of its boxes and flooded the floor of Hermann Hall—the HUB—made it a bit of a bog again). Not surprisingly, it’s The Bog—the former student and faculty hangout in the basement of HUB, closed for the past three years—that a group of current IIT students has successfully campaigned to reinstall, this time for good. The Bog, which featured a bowling alley, bar, and recreation center, was open for four decades. Thousands of alumni and faculty enjoyed the facility and have passed down their many fond memories and stories through the years. These stories helped to fuel the students’ desire to bring back The Bog.

Fall 2006

Jazzman

Alumnus Dan Love is Spreading the Rhythm of Engineering and Jazz ’Round midnight, the band begins to find its pace, warming to the room’s acoustics. A trumpeter steps toward the edge of the stage and delivers an impassioned solo, the notes now intimately entangled, now isolated in staccato flashes. Drinking...

Spring 2006

A Matter of Scale

Much like genetics, nanotechnology poses difficult questions that extend beyond the laboratory and into our daily lives. The first academic organization in the United States leading the nano ethics debate, IIT’s new Center on Nanotechnology and Society is an interdisciplinary collective of faculty, researchers, and thinkers who are weighing the...

Spring 2006

A Small World

From fuel cells to nanotechnology, Professor Dimitri Gidaspow has built a distinguished career through innovative work at the particle level. Professor Dimitri Gidaspow next to a fluidized bed in his lab in Perlstein Hall Professor Dimitri Gidaspow is an IIT institution. His work as both a researcher and a lifelong...

Spring 2006

New Horizon on the South Side

The corner of 35th and State streets at the southeast tip of IIT’s Main Campus is the locus for observing the future of Chicago’s Mid-South Side. With a 360-degree view of new construction and further development approved, activity at this intersection is signaling a neighborhood on the brink of a new era.