Inside this Issue

Features
Harris Harold

A Highly Charged Life

It was a scene that could have been out of a James Bond flick. A man knew he had been selected to participate in a top-secret mission and was given a train ticket to Chicago’s Union Station. Once at the station, he was to make a telephone call for instructions. The voice at the other end of the phone told the man to stand in a certain area of the station holding a newspaper under his left arm. He would then be approached by another man, who would ask him if he were waiting for someone to pick him up. If his response was “yes,” the man with the newspaper was to give his companion a designated telephone number, which was the password to their final destination, place unknown to the man with the newspaper.
Features
Peng Du

The Retrofitted City

Choosing to be an architect was Peng Du’s means to an end, rather than being his life goal. Du, a doctoral candidate at IIT College of Architecture, says his longtime passion has been in improving cities-learning more about how they work, how they’re organized, and how to keep them growing. He decided upon a career in architecture as a way to determine both how the building as a unit could play a more dynamic and sustainable role within its city family and how to encourage more people to make the city their home.
Features
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886–1969)

According to Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s obituary in the New York Times, S. R. Crown Hall (1956) was Mies’ favorite design project, with the Chicago Federal Center [Everett M. Dirksen U.S. Courthouse, John C. Kluczynski Federal Building, and U.S. Post Office, Loop Station] (1964, 1973, 1974) being his second favorite. Thanks to the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts and architect Sidney Epstein, one member of a group of architects who worked with Mies on the Federal Center project, the story behind this photo [above] of Mies and his bronze bust can be told.
Features
Lee de Forest receiving honorary doctorate from Lewis Institute

Lee de Forest (1873–1961)

Although instructor Lee de Forest taught at Lewis Institute and performed research at Armour Institute of Technology (AIT) for only a brief time, he entered into the wireless annals with the first successful long-distance telegraphy experiments while on what would become IIT Main Campus. A prolific inventor, de Forest, along with his business partner, E. H. Smythe, developed an improved telegraphic detector, which they called the responder, and conducted a series of wireless-transmission distance trials in the long hallways of Main Building as well as on its roof. In 1901 the duo met with further victory when they sent a signal-the letter “h” in Morse code-from the roof of Main Building to the now nonexistent Lakota Hotel at 30th Street and Michigan Avenue, about a half-mile from Main Campus.
IIT Magazine Cover Spring 2015
Vice President for Marketing and Communications

Jeanne Hartig

Managing Editor

Marcia Faye

Associate Editor

Chelsea Kalberloh Jackson

Contributors

Emma Macmillan
Koren Wetmore

Art Director/Design

Scott Benbrook

Illinois Tech Magazine is published two times a year by the Office of Marketing and Communications
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