Courthouse, Undergrad Project IIT, Elevations

Carter Manny studied architecture with three of the most prominent architects and institutions in the history of American modern architecture: at Harvard with Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer, and a young Philip Johnson; at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) with Ludwig Mies van der Rohe; and at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin school and studio. At IIT Manny’s senior project was the design of a court house, one of Mies’s standard exercises for students, which stemmed from his earlier designs for domestic architecture in Europe. The modern court house allowed students to create functional plans on a modest scale, as well as explore modern relationships between exterior and interior space. In this drawing of court house wall elevations, however, he displays a remarkable attention to surface and materials, including a diamond brick pattern on exterior walls and a floating screen in richly veined marble. This dynamic use of color and material recalls the mahogany and onyx used in Mies’s 1920s designs for the Barcelona Pavilion and Tugendhat House.