ILLINOIS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY (IIT), CHICAGO

This project took place on the campus of the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT), Chicago, with the aim of strengthening relationships between the IIT’s various fraternities and with incoming students.

In American higher-education institutions it is customary to try and bring students together in the early weeks of term, so this initiative was used as a starting point to generate a programme for promoting inter-student relations, including cultural areas, libraries, reading areas and even meeting points and concert zones. The architectural solution is based on creating a kind of network or ‘fabric’ by means of module repetition, which in this case would take the form of geometric triangulations. After said modules are linked to create the network, this then goes on to be inhabited by the students. That is to say, it begins with a geometry established in order to later host a programme for students, endowing the available spaces with recreational areas which connect students with each other – as well as with closed-off areas for reading and rest – all of which comes from bringing life to the ‘fabric’.

The project was awarded the highest available mark by the European University of Madrid.