Walking through the new IIT student center is like entering the late Mies van der Rohe's head. That's because the front door slides open through a glass portrait of the famous architect who designed much of the South Side university campus. Visitors step through Mies' mouth and nose, his eyes peering over them, as part of a giant portrait made up of tiny faceless stick figures, known mostly for their appearance outside bathroom doors. Using that international symbol for humans as a sort of new-age gargoyle, Holland architect Rem Koolhaas and New York graphics designer Michael Rock scattered the images throughout the new student center in humorous depictions -- a faceless human driving a motorcycle, climbing a mountain, taking a bath, skiing, playing the guitar, even cheating. Large collages of the figures are used to create oversized portraits, such as the Miesian entrance. "We based them on funny images that stone carvers embedded in the cornices at Yale," said Rock. "We wanted to have a similar levity in this building." Indeed, the $48.2 million Koolhaas student center -- officially called the McCormick Tribune Campus Center -- is a blend of reverent and irreverent attitudes. Unveiled today, the building marks the internationally acclaimed architect's first completed building in the United States. The humorous yet reverential portraits continue through the front door on a 79-foot glass wall that carries illustrations of seven university founders, including another image of Mies as a young man. Quickly dispensing with the architectural and historical genuflecting, Koolhaas begins his modernist assault to the senses in a sideways hourglass building designed for the Game Boy generation. Full article here.