In the 1970s, during a growing liberation movement that resisted the racial dispossession of Colorado’s Chicano community, a group of Mies van der Rohe’s disciples from the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) became instrumental in the design and planning of Denver’s Auraria Campus expansion—a master plan that united three institutions in the erasure of Auraria’s Chicano community. While the Auraria Campus has not merited the same scholarly attention as Mies’s design for IIT’s campus expansion into Chicago’s Bronzeville neighborhood, it necessarily provokes the question of influence as Mies’s disciples coalesced to explicitly cite and adapt Miesian principles onto a Hispanic context. This ongoing project traces the flow of influence from the later disciples back to the precursor modernist master’s pedagogy and practice at IIT to propose a revision to the historiography of Miesian modernism that points to its longer shadows of influence on racial geographies across the American landscape.

Leen Katrib is an assistant professor of architecture at the University of Kentucky. Her work investigates architecture’s materiality and historiography to design new frameworks for marginalized histories and material culture. Her research has been supported by Art Omi, MacDowell / National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, Harry der Boghosian Fellowship, Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship, Howard Crosby Butler Travel Grant, William & Neoma Timme Travel Grant, and George H. Mayr Travel Grant. Her work has been published in Deem, Future Anterior, Pidgin, Room One Thousand, Bracket, and various proceedings, and has been exhibited at Lexington Art League, Syracuse University, Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism in South Korea, Van Der Plas Gallery in New York City, and the A+D Museum in Los Angeles. Katrib holds a MArch from Princeton University and a BArch from the University of Southern California, and has practiced at Marvel, LTL Architects, Peter Marino, and OMA in New York.