A new exhibit at the Elmhurst Art Museum in Illinois explores a little-studied corner of Mies van der Rohe’s career: his brief fascination with pre-fabrication. The show, curated by Columbia University’s Barry Bergdoll, is physically and thematically anchored by Mies’ McCormick House, which was built in 1952 as a prototype for mass-produced modular homes. Located on the museum’s grounds in suburban Chicago since 1994, the house is now reopened following the first part of a multi-phase restoration project. Titled Mies’s McCormick House Revealed: New Views, the exhibition includes drawings on loan from MoMA’s collection, as well as works from a cast of local and international contemporary photographers. Its intent, says museum executive director John McKinnon, is to “contextualize the McCormick House, which has not been entered into the canon.”
A product of Mies’s collaboration with developer Herbert Greenwald, the house is composed of two pre-fabricated single-story pavilion-like volumes that slide past each other with bays subdivided by gleaming white I-beams and glass. After the structure was moved half a mile from its original location to the museum campus, it was connected to the main building via a hallway that plugged into a former carport. But the connection made it difficult to tell exactly where the old house began and the museum ended. With the removal of this corridor and the restoration of the carport (directed by Heritage Architecture Studio), the museum has gained a more generous plaza, and “liberated” the house, says Bergdoll.
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