As you may know, I did my undergrad in architecture here at Illinois Tech. Now, I’m graduating in May with my Masters of High Performance Buildings. While I may not be the archie everyone might remember from my first five years here, I definitely did my time in Crown Hall, spending over ten hours at a time in the building without eating, drinking, and, like most, bathing (look, it’s difficult to meet deadlines sometimes, one must sacrifice SOMETHING).
I know you non-architecture students may have heard rumors that Crown Hall can feel like an unfriendly environment to outsiders, but let me just tell you… it’s absolutely true. At least for my friend, it was.
The spring semester comes with so many twists and turns every year, including the weather. The past few weeks have been warm and sunny one day, then rain, then below freezing, all in the span of a few days, or even a few hours. April 9, 2026 was one of the nice ones.
My friend Sariah came to visit for the past week and, as we plan to live together in the near future, we wanted to spend as much time together as possible in hopes that we won’t get sick of each other. We decided to follow my regular school routine, as I’m not on spring break, and she respects my desire to attend all my classes. On Thursdays, I have a completely regular student schedule: 8:30-9:45 a.m. class, 10:00-12:00 p.m. work on something until my friend finishes his morning class, 12:00-1:00 p.m. get lunch, 1:00-1:30 p.m. attend club meeting, 2:00 p.m. go home, 3:00 p.m. do homework, 11:00 p.m. go to bed.
See? Totally normal. Now, the TASK that I do between class and lunch varies widely, as I’m still an architecture student at heart. And, of course, my task for the day was to unwrap a gigantic 11-foot wood structure that was supposed to be gone six months ago. And, if you know my friend Sariah, she will say yes to anything, at least within reason.
So. We get up early, train to school, sit through class. Check, check, check. Now we get to the task of the day.
Upon first walking into Crown Hall, we noticed it was a little warm. Just a little. So we get to work. We quickly unwrap the first bottom third of the form. Easy peasy. Then, my friend Elio (you all know him by now) stopped by for lunch. Great, perfect, let’s go eat and make friendships happen. Club meeting happens. Great, let’s read and yap about what we wrote. And then we go back to unwrapping, mainly because Sariah insists it’s easier for me to wind up the rope by myself, but I’d struggle to unwrap this behemoth alone. Of course, we get scolded for being too loud, which is kind of on us, because who would’ve thought that YANKING on rope that has been nailed down repeatedly to a hollow structure made of OSB would be noisy (we did, it’s our bad entirely). At this point, it’s been quite a bit of a day. It’s sweltering in Crown, Sariah and I have shed all our outer layers of clothes, and we’ve chugged all of our drinks.
We relocated to a different task, heading to a different building entirely. There, we cool down, but Sariah isn’t out of the woods yet. She asks for a few sips of my water here and there. Of course, I oblige, I’m not a monster. By the time we head back to Crown, both of us are exhausted and just want to leave. But we have twenty more layers of rope left. So we power through. Sariah finishes unwrapping the top by herself (we had since rolled it onto its side so we could attack it from the top) while I clean up. A simple, maybe fifteen extra minutes.
“Let’s go home,” she says, looking significantly more tired than she usually does (again, if you knew her, you’d be surprised by how she was acting).
As soon as we step in the door, Sariah collapses onto the floor of my bedroom.
And that’s the story of how my friend died.
Okay, no, she didn’t die. But she was acting like she was on the brink.
I wasn’t panicking. No, not one bit. Not at all. Do you believe me yet?
But, somehow, even as the youngest sibling in my family, I still have an older sibling “on” switch. I raced around my apartment grabbing whatever I could to help her out. We tried water, food, candy, Advil, anything to make the headache go away. I held her in my arms for a few hours. I let her sleep it off.
Eventually, Sariah recovered enough for us to eat dinner… at maybe 11 p.m.
Huzzah, the lovely and kind Sariah, who could do no wrong, was dead for three hours (and though it was probably closer to two and a half hours, it’s more dramatic to round up to three), and then rose again. It’s a late Easter miracle.
So yes, your concerns are real, Crown Hall is NOT safe for outsiders. That radiant heating on a warm day will be the death of you.