Menil Drawing Institute announced as finalist for prestigious prize
The Menil Drawing Institute and its architects, Los Angeles-based Johnston Marklee, are among the six finalists for the prestigious 2023 Mies Crown Hall Americas Prize, an award given every other year by the College of Architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology.
The $40 million Drawing Institute opened in 2018 as part of a major expansion to the Menil campus and represents the first freestanding facility designed for the exhibition, study, conservation and storage of modern and contemporary drawings.
Other finalists for the award are the remodeling and expansion of the Anahuacalli Museum in Mexico City by Taller/Mauricio Rocha; the Guadalupe Market in Tapachula, Mexico, by Colectivo C733; the Park in the Prado neighborhood in Medellin, Colombia, by the Mayor’s Office of Medellin and Secretary of Infrastructure; the Polygon Gallery in North Vancouver, British Columbia, by Patkau Architects; and the Valois Housing Building in Asuncion, Paraguay, by Jose Cubilla.
The winner will be announced March 24 at a symposium at IIT. In addition to the award, the winner will receive the MCHAP Chair in the architecture school and $50,000 to fund research and publication. Some 300 nominations were made by a network of expert nominators from throughout North and South America, focusing on buildings finished between December 2018 and June 2021. Those were culled to a group of 39, which received visits and architect/client interviews from the jury.
Already the building has gotten the attention of other prize juries, earning a 2022 AIA Architecture Award from that national organization.
The 30,000-squarefoot Menil’s Drawing Institute is a low-slung, elongated building with a trio of courtyards, all connected by a roof of thin painted steel meant to resemble a folded piece of paper. When trees cast their shadows, it, too, can look like a drawing all on its own.
Sharon Johnston, a partner at Johnston Marklee, which has designed a number of arts and culture buildings including the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and the University of Illinois at Chicago Center for the Arts, said the jury’s thorough process that evaluates the building’s design, how it fits into its neighborhood and how it is used by visitors adds value to the honor.
“The fact that they visit all of the projects and get to know the clients and how the building is used — its life after we’re gone, that’s how it ought to be,” Johnston said.
She credited the unusually-thin metal roof to Guy Nordenson Associates structural engineers, who also worked with architect Steven Holl on the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston’s Nancy and Rich Kinder Building, which opened in late 2020.
“It’s an unprecedented type of building, dedicated to art on paper, so we wanted to create a building that protects the works and, given its small size, is also welcoming and open and present,” she said, noting that it’s also a place for research, where conservation scholars can come together to collaborate.
The MCHAP was founded by IIT’s College of Architecture in 2013 as a biennial award for built works of architecture in the Americas. It is named after the building that houses the college, Crown Hall, which was designed by its longtime dean, Mies van der Rohe, one of the pioneers of modern architecture.
Finalists and the ultimate prize winner are chosen for “their connection with the natural and the human-made, the capacity to be a catalyst for activation and a social responsibility present through the creation of public space for the use of communities,” according to the prize committee.
Van der Rohe, who died in 1969, was the final head of the Bauhaus school of art, architecture and design before it was closed by the Nazis in the late 1930s. Van der Rohe came to the U.S. and served as the dean of IIT’s school of architecture for nearly two decades, replacing its traditional Ecole des Beaux-Art curriculum with a three-step process that emphasized modern design and materials, such as industrial steel and plate glass with minimal framework.
In addition to the iconic Barcelona chair and Brno chair, van der Rohe is known for designing many buildings in the U.S., including Chicago Federal Center Plaza, Farnsworth House and the Seagram Building in New York. In Houston, he designed two additions to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston that became the Caroline Wiess Law Building.