On March 31, 2023, colleagues and friends of the late Arthur S. Takeuchi (June 16, 1931–October 28, 2022), the longest-serving full-time tenured professor at IIT College of Architecture and the last of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s students on the faculty, presented two lectures in his honor in S. R. Crown Hall.
IIT Architecture faculty member Jong Soung Kimm discussed “Space as an Architectural Problem,” a consideration of the genesis of Mies’s free space concept (as evidenced in his Barcelona Pavilion, Tugendhat House, Farnsworth House, and Crown Hall, among others); the use of the court house model for teaching the space concept; and the application of such concepts in large-scale spaces.
Professor Mahjoub Elnimeiri’s “Structural Architecture” lecture focused on the educational legacy of Takeuchi’s teaching, especially through the concept of “structural architecture,” a Miesian notion that architectural form should derive from or be expressive of a building’s structural logic.
Professor Takeuchi was known especially for his courses in construction, visual training, and the Space Problem studio that originated within Mies’ curriculum. The lessons of proportion, harmony, clarity, and precision that he taught through these courses reflected Mies’s teachings and carried that legacy forward many years after the noted architect had left the school.