Mies van der Rohe's Forgotten Frat House Design is Resurected and Repurposed

The newly unveiled 60-foot-wide, 140-foot-long steel and glass building is an exemplar of Mies’s signature understated but innovative style.

More than 70 years after its inception, a forgotten Mies van der Rohe architectural design has finally been realized. This week, Indiana University opened its Mies van der Rohe building to students, faculty, and the public. The new campus landmark will provide lecture, workshop, and student collaboration spaces, as well as administrative offices for the university’s Eskenazi School of Art, Architecture + Design. Under construction since June 2020, the building was funded through a $20 million gift from Sidney and Lois Eskenazi.

Mies’s elegant design at IU was originally supposed to be a frat house. In the early 1950s, two Indianapolis businessmen commissioned the renowned German architect to design a residence for the Alpha Theta chapter of Pi Lambda Phi. However, the fraternity wasn’t able to raise enough money for the project, and it was abandoned. In 1985, a former fraternity president died, and his widow discovered Mies’s blueprints for the building among her late husband’s effects. She passed these along to a former fraternity treasurer, who then donated the plans to the Museum of Modern Art in New York.