Educating the Moral Scientist: The Chapels at I.I.T. and M.I.T.

Abstract

The architects of the chapels at the Illinois Institute of Technology (1949–1952, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1950–1955, Eero Saarinen) employed strikingly modern forms to assert religions relevance to scientific education. Yet the architecture of the I.I.T. and M.I.T. chapels and their location within the campus plans reveal the compromised position of religion in higher education at mid-century. Although the I.I.T. and M.I.T. administrations believed it necessary to foster the moral education of their scientists, especially following the use of the atomic bomb in World War II, the chapels did not convey the same strong architectural image as the monumental campus chapels of the early twentieth century. The Robert F. Carr Memorial Chapel of St. Savior at I.I.T., Mies van der Rohe’s only ecclesiastical building, offers no external indication of its religious identity and is oriented away from campus life. While the M.I.T. administration sought to create a modern New England meeting house on the common, Saarinen’s Kresge Auditorium and M.I.T. Chapel divided the civic and religious, the public and private. The small scale of these chapels further reflected the increasing privatization of religion in the mid-twentieth century.