Alumni Hall was Mies van der Rohe's first classroom building on the campus. As he did in most of the academic buildings which followed, Mies used a module a bay 24 feet long, 24 feet wide and 12 feet high to allow for flexibility and efficiency in laying out classrooms, labs, and offices. The steel grid of the building's curtain wall suggests the actual steel structure within.

City codes mandate that structural steel frames in buildings taller than one story be encased in fireproof material. A large two-story space on the north side, originally intended for use by the Naval ROTC unit, was divided and converted to other uses in 1972. Currently only one 24-foot bay remains a two-story space. 

1945-46, Mies van der Rohe, with Holabird and Root

Mies van der Rohe Society

Alumni Memorial Hall is home to IIT's Department of Civil and Architectural Engineering. As part of Phase II of the campus renovation project, Alumni Hall will be organized around allied research and education purposes in areas of critical or emerging industrial need in these fields. These include advanced building infrastructure technologies, structural components of high-rise buildings, and innovations in transportation and road surface technologies. 

As of Today

	A new computer aided design (CAD) lab has been added to the second floor of Alumni Memorial Hall. The lab will be used by the architectural engineering department.
	The civil engineering materials laboratory has just received a new $100,000 universal testing machine that can test the tension, compression and other properties of metal, concrete and wood.