The main campus of Illinois Institute of Technology certainly is a
great place to check out buildings by a variety of famous
architects. The building next to this cache, the Herman Union
Building, as well as Galvin Library to the north of this structure
were designed by another great Chicago architect, Walter Netsch.
At certain times the area may be flooded with muggles. No
one will pay any attention to your search, since strange people
doing strange things is the norm around here, but do be very
careful not to be seen when removing and replacing the cache.
Remember to hide it as well or better than you found it.
Parking can also be difficult. There are some metered spots
to the south of here, but they are usually full. There is a
visitor lot north of the MTCC building and cache, but it's a $4.00
minimum, which gives you four hours. Street parking is also
available at various spots around the campus.
Walter Netsch is, perhaps, most famous for the
Chapel at the United States Air Force Academy. Netsch's
buildings usually are done in a brutalist style using concrete with
lots of squares at different angles. The two buildings he designed
for IIT, however, were done as an homage to Mies van der Rohe's
Crown Hall, which was the building next to the "Throne Room" cache.
While these buildings may look similar to Crown Hall, subtle
differences become more striking the more you examine the
buildings.
The Herman Union Building (the HUB) used to be the campus center
before the McCormick Tribune Campus Center (the BUTT) was
built. IIT doesn't have a football team, but, when I was an
undergrad, they did have a bowling team, and the bowling alley in
the basement of the HUB was where they would practice. Before
the HUB was built, the land it was on was low, and often flooded to
quite a depth. I've seen pictures on campus that show people
rowing a boat across the area. That area of the campus was know as
the Bog. That's why the campus bar and grill, on the lower
level of the HUB, is called the Bog.
For information about architectural tours of the campus, please
check out:
http://mies.iit.edu/tours/
Those of you who are more familiar with Chicago politics than
with Chicago architecture may have heard of his wife, Dawn Clark
Netsch, who ran for Governor of Illinois in 1994.