Master of Science in Art Education, Fall 1955
Institute of Design
Institute of Design: Master of Science in Art Education, Fall 1955 [brochure title]. Chicago, IL: Institute of Design, Illinois Institute of Technology, 1955. Four panel brochure printed in two colors on recto only and machine folded into quarters for mailing [as issued]. A fine copy of a rare survivor.
8 x 19-inch folded single sided brochure for Masters of Science in Art Education course options for the 1955 Fall semester at the Institute of Design, Illinois Institute of Technology. Designed around the not-yet-completed facade of S. R. Crown Hall by Mies van der Rohe. Features a syllabus of Art Education classes taught by Ray Pearson, Raymond Fink, Aaron Siskind, Art Sinsabaugh, and John Henry Waddell.
One of Chicago's great cultural achievements, the Institute of Design was among the most important schools of photography in twentieth-century America. It began as an outpost of experimental Bauhaus education and was home to an astonishing group of influential teachers and students, including László Moholy-Nagy, Harry Callahan, and Aaron Siskind.
In 1937 László Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946), a Hungarian Jew fleeing Nazi Germany, was brought to Chicago by the city's industrial leaders to establish a school of industrial design to be modeled after the original Bauhaus in Germany, the pioneering school of art, design and architecture where Moholy had taught previously. Although the New Bauhaus lasted only one year (1937-1938), it was quickly reorganized as the School of Design (1939-1944) and eventually became the Institute of Design (1944-present). The photographs produced in the ID's early years were controlled studio experiments, more concerned with form and materials than with imitating works by photography's masters or documenting the world. Moholy's photograms, for example, are elegant light studies that reveal the complete scale of gray between black and white and illustrate photography's abstract potential.
Along similar lines, faculty member György Kepes (1906-2001) produced an extensive series of photographs of his wife in which he explored solarization and negative exposure and even painting on the picture's surface. Nathan Lerner (1913-1997), a student and later teacher at the ID, worked with refractive lenses and photomontage and used his light box to test the pictorial effects of pure light. Another student, Milton Halberstadt (1919-2000), produced a triple -exposed portrait to showcase photography's capacity for simultaneous vision. At a moment when American photography was largely confined to more conventional portraiture, landscape or documentary reportage, these experimental and abstract pictures revealed the enormous creative potential of the medium.
As the school grew, Moholy hired Arthur Siegel (1913-1978) and Harry Callahan (1912-1999) to lead a new, four-year program in photography. After Siegel resigned, Callahan hired Aaron Siskind (1903-1991), and the two formed a superbly effective teaching team that is now legendary. Under their leadership, the program's emphasis shifted from experimentation toward the development of individual vision and subjective expression.
S. R. Crown Hall, designed by the German-American Modernist architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, is the home of the College of Architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, Illinois.
Mies van der Rohe designed several dozen buildings for the southern side Illinois Institute of Technology. Most of these structures employ a brick and glass infill system within an exposed steel frame. When he was given the opportunity to design Crown Hall in 1950, Mies deviated from the norm and built a totally different structure which no one had seen before.
Widely regarded as one of Mies van der Rohe's masterpieces, Crown Hall, completed in 1956, is one of the most architecturally significant buildings of the 20th century Modernist movement. Crown Hall is considered architecturally significant because Mies van der Rohe refined the basic steel and glass construction style, beautifully capturing simplicity and openness for endless new uses. Creating this openness was achieved by the building having a suspended roof, without the need for interior columns. This created a universal space that could be endlessly adapted to new uses. Typically, older buildings up to 1956 had columns to support the roof from caving in, but Crown Hall does not require them. While designing Crown Hall, Mies stayed true to his famous words, "less is more" and he considered the building to be the best embodiment of the maxim. At the time of being built, the idea of providing a single large room for the school of architecture and city planning's 300 students was to be particularly workable, and for the student to not be isolated from others who may be further or less advanced in the course then he/she. Although, shortly after being built, Architects began to question the relevancy of Mies’s work. — Wikipedia