So imagine that you’re the city of Chicago, home to famous architects Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright and Mies van der Rohe. You are widely respected for having the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT), a school whose architecture was designed by Mies and houses the masterpiece known as Crown Hall. Given other options, why would you destroy one of Mies’ buildings, even this minor one (which, it should be noted, is outside the Mies master-planned area of IIT)? Well that is what’s happening with the “Test Cell” later this week as it is demolished to make room for a new commuter line.

“If you had even a minor doodle by Rembrandt, and you weren’t forced to throw it in a fire, why would you?” another proponent of saving the building, Chicago architecture critic Edward Lifson, wrote on his “Hello Beautiful!” blog.

Given what Edward Lifson has posted on the subject, I don’t understand why they couldn’t redirect the line a bit to go around this site. I was there last year and there’s quite a bit of open space around IIT and the “Test Cell.” It seems a pretty intentional move to obliterate this structure. I agree with Lifson, the line would be much more interesting if it passed next to the work of Mies van der Rohe instead of through where it used to be.

I also know that Chicago is a big city and is going to have to increasingly balance the new with the old. In cases like this, the new just better improve upon the old. It’s hard to say that the new Metra station design is better than even a minor work of Mies. To read a thoughtful piece on why they are moving forward with the demolition, you should read the Chicago Tribune piece by Blair Kamin. The postscript at the end of the article makes some salient points on behalf of Mies’ grandson.

No matter what, a small piece of Mies’ history will be removed this week. If you live in Chicago and are a fan of Mies van der Rohe, get your photos now.

• Picture of the “Test Cell” on flickr

The lunchtime presenter at Seed 3 was Edward Lifson who dropped in to tell us a bit about the building we were in. I’ll admit, I loved the Seed Conference, but Crown Hall was easily one of the largest stars of the day for me. I became an enthusiastic Mies van der Rohe fan while listening to Lifson in this most exquisite setting.

Lifson is most well known for his work on NPR and has reported extensively on architecture, city planning, public art and the like. He also happens to be a huge fan of Mies van der Rohe and lives in van der Rohe’s Lakeshore Drive apartments in Chicago.

Lakeshore Dr. Apartments, Chicago, IL

Crown Hall

Crown Hall is considered one of Mies van der Rohe’s masterworks and he himself was quite pleased with it. When asked about his architecture, the understated Mies stated:

“Many of them turned out as expected but perhaps the best example of what we’re trying to do is Crown Hall.” – Mies van der Rohe

Crown Hall exudes a sense of calm and zen-like tranquility. As light changes outside it can be felt instantaneously throughout the interior. Indeed, as Lifson stood on stage and spoke, he would occasionally stop and marvel at the remarkable setting he was in. He took great care to point out that even his slightly elevated perspective from the podium was causing him to see the building in a new way, and that we were all lucky to be able to see the building so soon after its recent renovation.

Upon the approach to the building there is a sense of ascension into an elevated profession (architecture). The building, thanks to its signature entrance stairs, use of glass, and its hanging ceiling appears to float, a Mies trademark.

The frosted glass around the lower interior windows contributes to this sense of floating as only vague shadows and light from the exterior penetrate inside. When you want to look through clear glass, you’re looking up into the treetops, as if for enlightenment. I can only assume that working inside the building feels quite special. One of the anecdotes Lifson brought up was that our conference was seated right in the same spot that Mies’s architecture students would sit. It was apparently said that students would get up to walk across the hall to ask Mies a question and often figure out the answer for themselves on the way over to his desk.

Crown Hall is about being in space.

“Architecture starts when you put two bricks together.” – Mies van der Rohe

Oddly, I have less notes about Lifson’s presentation than any of the other speakers at the conference. I will say, however, that his enthusiasm and awe left a real indelible impression on me. It made me want to understand more about Mies van der Rohe and spurred me to explore his other buildings during my trip.

330 North Wabash (formerly the IBM Building)

Links:

• Who is Edward Lifson
• “The New Modernist,” Edward Lifson’s Blog

[Disclaimer: What you have read in this post is my recollection and my notes from the event. I make no claims to 100% transcription accuracy and if I botched something, I'm happy to fix it - just drop me a comment.]

Jason Fried decided to part with the “Getting Real” presentations he’s been giving for a while and focused on why the details matter and how 37signals thinks about the details of their products. His talk was sprinkled with tons of application demonstrations and interface development experience.

Fried started with a high level discussion on the building Seed 3 was being held in, S. R. Crown Hall, by Mies van der Rohe. This building is a great example of how paying attention to details yields a product beyond the base components. You can feel the details before you even see them. For instance, one of the things that Crown Hall is most well known for is its floating ceiling, something you don’t necessarily catch when you walk through the door – it’s too subtle for that. It’s only upon deeper reflection and analysis that you see the thought behind the design; you notice the gap between the edges of the ceiling and the windows running the entire perimeter of the building. Van der Rohe really wanted a feeling of floating to permeate the space and it does. Light changes moment to moment, altering the entire mood of the interior. The roof is suspended from the building frame above. None of the interior walls or posts are structural.

Also noteworthy, in Crown Hall, is the alignment of all the building materials – the roof tiles line up with the floor tiles, which line up with the building frame and windows. Everything is perfect. Even smaller things, like the sprinkler system, are made to fit within the overall design concept, they’re not afterthoughts.

These observations are what led Fried into discussing the development of software. One of the nice benefits to working in software, rather than building masterworks of architecture, is that you can build and tweak iteratively and quickly at very low cost. For Fried’s software, “building IS designing.”

37signals tends to use pretty low resolution designs. In fact, if it can’t be drawn with a sharpie, they feel there is too much detail. It’s only by building in this way that you end up focusing on actual user experiences with your applications rather than thinking in terms of artsy screens. The products 37signals builds try to think through people actually using them for repetitive workflows. For instance, task entry using Ta-Da Lists is as simple as title -> return -> task -> return -> task …

Writing copy

At 37signals, they consider copy to be part of the design and not just a means of explaining their product. When you write copy, “it has to make sense to read out loud,” says Fried. Explain your features in ways that your audience will understand, not in techno-babble.

“If you wouldn’t say something in conversation, don’t say it in your app.” – Jason Fried, 37signals

Make your app have “photographic memory”

One of the other UI concepts expressed in Fried’s talk was about remembering what your users are doing so that you can make it easier for them to repeat it. User preferences are a horrible way of doing this. It’s much better to look at what your users are doing and have the application be smart enough to guess it the next time.

An example of this in action would be adding tasks to a to-do list. If you have multiple to-do lists, it’s not a good idea to have a default list and then require customers to always move items from that list to other lists. Instead, have the application be mart enough to know which list a task was added to and remember that to suggest the next time the user adds a task. Chances are good that your users are repeating tasks if they’re using your application – they’re in a particular mode and it’s best not to break their concentration.

Time is the new vector of interface design

How you time activities that occur on your site and in your application has an enormous impact on how responsive and intuitive your application feels to users. If a user deletes an item from a list and the object just disappears or the page refreshes the page, this time without the item, it might be difficult for the user to figure out what happened. If you instead, show the deleted item fading out over the course of a quarter second and then the items below it sliding up the list to replace it, you’ve done something more visually intuitive and noteworthy while making the user more comfortable the action they just completed.

Other Jason Fried:

• BusinessPOV Video from June 2008: Jason Fried explaining how his work is like that of a museum curator or a chef with a request to add bananas to his lasagna.
• BusinessPOV Video from April 2007: Jason explains how 37signals builds software with tiny decisions.

[Disclaimer: What you have read in this post is my recollection and my notes from the event. I make no claims to 100% transcription accuracy and if I botched something, I'm happy to fix it - just drop me a comment.]

I’m not the most well-versed theatre-goer you’ve ever met. I don’t know the major playwrights or the “can’t miss” plays that come through town. What I do know, however, is that “Three Days of Rain” (playing through February 24th) is an exquisitely written piece by Richard Greenberg and that the production is ably directed and deftly acted by the small cast.

The opening act of the play occurs in an unoccupied Manhattan loft, the long-abandoned apartment of a recently deceased architect. His two children and step-child have reunited after significant time apart to hear the reading of his will, converging on the town from various points domestic and international. They bring their vastly different psychoses and desire to reconnect to a quick simmer as memories are dredged and old wounds reopened.

Evan Whitfield, playing Walker, really shines as a remorse-filled drifter, saddened by missing the end of his father’s life while in Italy. The act is a series of sharply written familial recollections by Walker; his sister, Nan; and their semi-famous half-brother, Pip. They discover elements of the gloomy apartment that contrast sharply with what they know of their deceased patriarch and speculate on earlier times when their parents used to live there. Their father’s journal, tersely written in cryptic one-liners, fuels their curiosity.

The second act occurs in the same apartment, with the same actors playing their respective parents, 35 years prior. This act is less psychological, more philosophical, as the two men, now playing “soon-to-be well-known architects” debate the merits of various architectural icons and struggle to make their mark with their initial architectural commission while sharing an attraction for the same southern belle, Lina.

“Architecture should speak of its time and place, but yearn for timelessness.” – Frank Gehry

The time shift in the play serves as a really nice literary device allowing the actors to explore how the future will eventually be reconstructed out of the products of the past, with no more clarity than they enjoy in the present. These two stories, played out 35 years apart, weave a very compelling story that reverberates across a generational gap in a novel and enjoyable way.

Go see this play. It’s only here a couple more weeks and it’s well worth it, I promise.